Fingerprint authentication using KDE on Fedora 11
Aug 29th, 2009 by diegobz
In Fedora 11 we had a very cool feature that allows people with laptops, with fingerprint reader, to be able to authenticate using a single finger. Although the feature page of Fedora only explains how to enable it using GNOME and gdm, I just found out how to enable it using KDE and kdm.
First of all, I needed to find out if my Dell Vostro 1310 had the fingerprint reader supported by fprintd. I just ran a `lsusb` and realized that my reader (ID: 0483:2016) was supported by the upekts driver. So far so good. 
After it, I ran the following command to install some packages. I’m not sure if everything here is really needed, but you know, in any case I just left them there.
yum -y install fprintd fprintd-pam authconfig
Once I got all packages installed I enabled the Fingerprint authentication. You can do it running `system-config-authentication` or `authconfig`.
The next step was to ‘register’ my finger to my user. For doing it I just opened a command line terminal and ran `fprintd-enroll`. This required me to pass my finger on the reader three times and that was it.
If anything goes wrong it will probably tell you, but anyway you can verify your fingerprint with `fprintd-verify`.
Once everything was ready I just did a logout and now either in the kdm or in the screenlock of KDE, I just need to hit Enter pass my finger on the reader and hit Enter again.
Thanks for sharing that! I’m trying hard to keep myself from switching to KDE and that made it even harder. I’m losing my excuses
Thanks for the great help! If I’m correct you will have problems when you want to login with ssh for that account.
Thanks!