Fingerprint login on Fedora 11
June 9th, 2009
My work laptop is a Lenovo T61 (side note: easily the best laptop I’ve ever had). It comes with some cool extra features, such as a fingerprint scanner that until now has remained unused. After a bit of dorking around, I got it enabled in Fedora 11.
It was actually pretty simple. I just needed to install a few extra packages:
yum -y install fprintd fprintd-pam gdm-plugin-fingerprint
The next step is to tell Fedora to allow fingerprint logins. This is easily done through the GUI through System > Administration > Authentication. Under the Authentication tab, select “Enable Fingerprint Reader Support”. Keep in mind that since it’s a system-wide preference, you’ll need root to make that change.
Once the Fedora install itself will let you login with a fingerprint, you need to register your own. The easy way would be through the UI at System > Preferences > About Me; a button for Fingerprint Login should be at the top right of the resulting dialog. In my poking around I had actually registered (or “enrolled” in their terminology) my fingerprint through the terminal. There are a series of fprintd- executables that will let you bypass the UI. In this case, I used fprintd-enroll (I won’t talk through the steps, it’s all very self-explanatory) and then fprintd-verify to run a quick test to make sure it could read it back correctly.
That’s it. Log out, select your name in the list, and swipe away. Sure, I only lock my laptop when I’m at school. Yes, my password takes maybe 3 seconds to type in. But this wasn’t about making my life easier, it was about the cool factor. And yes, being able to log in by reading my fingerprint is damn freaking cool.
