The firmware and drivers for the Fingerprint Reader for Linux are finally ready as promised a few months ago. I’m not sure whether this was an accomplishment of Lenovo of the open-source community ¯_(ツ)_/¯. I suggest to wait until the firmware reached a stable state. But if you are feeling adventurous you can get it working right now!

You can check whether you have the reader I’m talking about by using lsusb. Make sure to have a device with the id 06cb:00bd.

Installing the Latest Firmware

You have the install the following two firmwares from LVFS:

You can install these using fwupdmgr install <fw.cab> or enable the testing remote using fwupdmgr enable-remote lvfs-testing as root user. Power off your laptop and start it again.

Getting the Latest libfprint

The libfprint which is packaged for most distributions is not ready for the firmware yet. You can clone the latest libfprint though to communicate with the fingerprint reader:

git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libfprint/libfprint.git
git checkout b8e558452a97ac5cd026456b4e5a514d628b6747
cd libfprint && meson builddir
cd builddir && ninja

You now use examples/enroll and examples/verify to test your fingerprint reader! The latest version of this library and its daemon is also packaged on Arch Linux: fprintd-libfprint2 and libfprint-git