Enable Fingerprint Authentication on PopOS

I recently switched to trying out System 76’s PopOS Linux on my Thinkpad laptop. So far I am extremely happy daily driving this distro but, out of the box, it doesn’t seem to have built-in support for my laptop’s fingerprint reader. Luckily, it’s extremely simple to fix this.

The first step is to install the necessary packages:

1sudo apt update && sudo apt install fprintd libpam-fprintd

Next, we need to enroll our fingerprint. This is done by running the following command and continuously placing your finger on the sensor:

1fprintd-enroll

Finally, we just need to update PAM to use the newly enrolled fingerprint:

sudo pam-auth-update

Once this is done you’re all set!