How to enable the integrated fingerprint reader

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Sub-howtos for enabling the integrated fingerprint reader on ThinkPads:

Free software

fprint

The most current effort to support fingerprint readers is the fprint project. The fprint software comprises the libraries libfprint and libpam-fprint (which provides authentication via PAM) and the daemon fprintd.

It seems that lately this project has stalled; no support for newer chips has emerged for some time.

Fingerprint GUI

Makes use of libfprint.

Feb 2011: The following works as smoothly on Ubuntu and T410s: https://launchpad.net/~fingerprint/+archive/fingerprint-gui

ThinkFinger

Alternatively, the original ThinkFinger project is at http://thinkfinger.sourceforge.net. It only provides support for the 1st generation reader, and has not been updated since 2007; see the How to enable the integrated fingerprint reader with ThinkFinger for detailed instructions. It is also in Debian Lenny. This integrates seamlessly with PAM and doesn't produce a tacky graphical prompt.

Hint:
If you've followed the instructions and "tf-tool --verify" works, but nothing else does, make sure that the "uinput" module is loaded.

Binary-only drivers

A closed source driver for the UPEK device is available. It interfaces to the hardware as a user-space USB driver through /proc/bus/usb and provides a BioAPI 1.10 device, which can then be interfaced to pam for authentication by user programs. The driver can be downloaded from http://www.upek.com/support/downloads/linux/; see the corresponding HOWTO for detailed instructions. It however tends to be less stable than the above opensource drivers.

Links

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