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Lenovo X1 Extreme fingerprint reader on Arch

2023-08-09 #hardware

Setting up the Synaptics Prometheus fingerprint reader to work with sudo and i3lock

This spells out the instructions from the Arch wiki for the specific case of the Lenovo X1 Extreme 2nd Gen (and possibly more recent models).

$ lsusb | rg -i fingerprint
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 06cb:00bd Synaptics, Inc. Prometheus MIS Touch Fingerprint Reader

This Synaptics Prometheus MIS Touch Fingerprint Reader is among the devices supported by fprint.

Firmware update

First, we need to update the firmware of the reader:

$ sudo pacman -S fwupmgr
$ fwupmgr get-updates
$ fwupmgr update [UUID1] [UUID2]

where the two UUIDs are the ones corresponding to the Prometheus sensor and its configuration, as shown in the get-updates subcommand.

Enrolment

Next, we enrol our favourite finger:

$ fprintd-enroll

Swipe your finger on the sensors until it confirms enrolment.

Check that your finger is now recognized:

$ fprintd-verify

Applications setup

sudo

Add the following to /etc/pam.d/sudo:

auth sufficient pam_fprintd.so

You can now sudo with your fingerprint. Password fallback occurs after 3 failures.

blurlock/i3lock

Edit /etc/pam.d/i3lock to

auth sufficient pam_unix.so
auth sufficient pam_fprintd.so

If you use blurlock (which is just a wrapper around i3lock), remove the -e option (ignore empty password) in the invocation of i3lock.

The screen can be then unlocked with either:

Entering an erroneous password will force using fingerprint authentication.

Note that the current version of i3lock has some quirks with PAM, see this issue.