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I've been trying to get fingerprint login working for a new Lenovo ThinkPad P15v, and had seen the information here and other places suggesting that fingerprint login was available in default 20.04 in the "Users" control panel.

Although no-one has shown screenshots as I understand the fingerprint UI should be here:

User account settings control panel with space for fingerprint UI

However as you can see it is not. My best guess was that its absence was related to being on an active directory login - since that has caused other strange "gotchas", for example around Unix vs Active directory group membership, however I could not find any reference anywhere, and our IT didn't think they had any policies to enable it.

Greg
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1 Answers1

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Grabbing the source for the control panel I found panels/user-accounts/cc-fingerprint-manager.c I found the following short-circuit:

  if (act_user_get_uid (priv->user) != getuid () ||
      !act_user_is_local_account (priv->user))
    {
      set_state (self, CC_FINGERPRINT_STATE_NONE);
      return;
    }

So the section doesn't appear because the user account is not of the "local type". Its not a policy setting from Active Directory, its a policy setting built into the fingerprint UI itself. I've not been able to find any reason in particular for this limitation, perhaps it just an incomplete implementation.

However I did manage to get fingerprint login and lockscreen working. The limitation is only in that one place in the control panel. So just use the command-line to enroll some fingers:

$ fprintd-enroll -f right-index-finger
$ fprintd-enroll -f left-index-finger
$ fprintd-enroll -f right-middle-finger

Logging in/out may be required (haven't validated this), but now on the login and lock screens, after choosing a user (or hitting a key to bring up the password entry) it shows (or swipe finger) just pop your finger on the reader and in you go (can take around a second's delay).

Its possible future changes to Ubuntu and/or Gnome might make an official policy selection that could require Active Directory (or other remote account type policy) to enable fingerprints, but for now it works.

Greg
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