Fingerprint support under Linux is spotty at best. For many laptops one will never be able to use it. Fortunately, somebody went through the effort to make drivers for VFS7500 Touch Fingerprint Sensor used on P70.

Unfortunately instructions to install it on Ubuntu 20.04 are not really complete so I here is what worked for me. Newer Ubuntu steps should be reasonably similar if not same but I haven’t checked them from scratch.

First I installed a few packages. Since drivers use combination of snap and python, we obviously need them. GMP library is needed to as it’s dependency of pyfast library.

[type title=“Terminal” prompt="# "] # sudo apt-get install --yes snapd python3-pip libgmp-dev # sudo pip install pyusb pycrypto pyfast [/type]

Then we can follow original install procedure:

[type title=“Terminal” prompt="# "] # sudo snap install validity-sensors-tools # sudo snap connect validity-sensors-tools:raw-usb # sudo snap connect validity-sensors-tools:hardware-observe [/type]

With all in place we can finally initialize reader:

[type title=“Terminal” prompt="# "] # sudo validity-sensors-tools.initializer [/type]

Lastly, install libfprint TOD driver.

[type title=“Terminal” prompt="# "] sudo add-apt-repository -u ppa:3v1n0/libfprint-vfs0090 sudo apt-get install --yes libfprint-2-tod-vfs0090 [/type]

Now you should see Fingerprint Login in system’s Users applet. Once you enroll your one or more finger, you should be able to use it for login.