Enabling Kubuntu Fingerprint Support

After installing Kubuntu on my Framework laptop, I found all hardware was fully supported. It took me a while to notice that my fingerprint scanner was missing. Mind you, hardware was supported but KDE simply didn’t show interface to use it. Well, we cannot have that.

Fortunately, enabling fingering is as simple as running two commands.

sudo apt install -y fprintd libpam-fprintd
sudo pam-auth-update

The first command installs software support, while the second command allows usage of the fingerprint for authentication. However, on Kubuntu you will notice that this sometime works, sometime not. The way the default files are written (/etc/pam.d/common-auth), the first failure will result module being ignored until password is entered. If you want a bit more permissive fingerprint handling, you can adjust max_tries a bit.

sudo sed -i 's/pam_fprintd.so max-tries=1/pam_fprintd.so max-tries=3/g' /etc/pam.d/common-auth

And now you have it, a fingerprint support that allows for some leeway.