Re: [External] Re: Debian and fingerprint readers
Thanks Sam & Wouter
On 05/03/2021 02:52, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 04, 2021 at 05:57:15PM -0500, Sam Hartman wrote:
>> The parts of Debian that are trying to do that are some of the desktop
>> environments. So, I'd approach the maintainers of Gnome and KDE and
>> see if they are interested in recommending this functionality.
Unless I'm misunderstanding this - there's already support in Gnome for
it. Not sure about KDE (I was trying the latest plasma a couple of weeks
ago but didn't think about fingerprints...doh).
It's just a case of needing the libfprint and fprintd packages installed
and then under settings->user you can start registering your prints.
>
> It could also be added to the laptop task, which would mean it would be
> installed by default on all laptops that are installed with debian-installer
>
> Alternatively, d-i has some hardware detection functionality, to install
> the correct drivers for hardware that is found. One could add entries
> for supported fingerprint readers to the hardware detection in d-i, and
> then install the necessary packages.
>
That sounds interesting - and smart. So we could detect the USB ID for
the reader and if it's a supported device install libfprint and fprintd
but not otherwise?
Could you point me at where that's done? I'd be interested in having a
poke around
> The hard part, however, is configuring all this so it works correctly
> out of the box, also for users who don't want to use it.
>
Agreed - and that's what triggered this thread :) I just did install of
those two packages and it worked - which was pretty nice. There aren't
any hoops that needed jumping through.
It's not a big deal not doing this if this is controversial - but
fingerprint has been one of those features that I have I've been
surprised as to how popular and wanted it's been by linux users. There
is something nice about just tapping the reader and being logged in.
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