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Preamble

I need to buy 8 external fingerprint readers but I'm not sure they will work on the latest version of Ubuntu and I do not want to spend money blindly.

The readers I would like to purchase are the Security USB Biometric Fingerprint Reader Lock by Sienoc and the USB Fingerprint Reader from Powstro, both (as always) declared compatible only with Windows because not tested by the seller on Linux.

All I need is to find one cheap reader that is compatible with PAM logins, therefore tested hardware recommendations are welcome.

Questions

  1. Has anyone tested one of these fingerprint readers on Debian or Ubuntu?
  2. What level of functionality should I expect with the latest GNU/Linux kernel?
  3. Are proprietary drivers required?

1 Answer 1

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Fingerprint readers are supported by Gnome DE and virtual terminals via PAM, but there are still no GNU/Linux compatible programs to support login web forms.
The development of libraries for fingerprint readers is almost complete but there are no applications that fully exploit them: in particular authentication is supported but user identification for multi-user systems is not.

More information is available from:

Older Elan readers are fully supported, along with those from major brands.
Readers which impose encryptions protocols may not be recognized, so (since it can be difficult to find the chipset in use) you should really buy with reserve if you own GNU/Linux systems and explicit support is not declared in the specifications from the seller.

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