How to get the fingerprint reader to work?

Ask Fedora
, , , ,
1

Whenever I try to register a fingerprint, I see the following message:
“Failed to claim fingerprint device ElanTech Fingerprint
Sensor: The device is already claimed by another process”

What “other process”? I haven’t registered any before.
Though i did have Windows 11 installed on this device previously (but I did a fresh install of Fedora and this is not a dual boot device). Is there something in the BIOS?

My specs are:
Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 4
Fedora Linux 38 (Workstation Edition)
Gnome 44.5
Wayland

2

I found this thread that had same issues on using elantech not sure does it eventually fix yours, but you can always try and use this thread as helping guide and setup forint

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/12dv9ce/i_finally_got_my_fingerprint_working_on_fedora_so/

3

Quick note on this, it looks like the thinkpad E series require a special proprietary driver for their fingerprint reader.

Unfortunately, Lenovo seems to only offer it as a .deb package, as seen on their driver page…

You could probably get it working on fedora, but OP would need to extract the binary out of the package and repackage it as a RPM…

4

Thank you for the response. Where do you see the .deb package ?
The files are downloading as zips and the extract is a “.so” file.

5

Huh, please forgive (oops! sorry automod, got a little too heated with… myself… there), I somehow missed that.

That’s actually a good thing. You’re looking at a binary file. You won’t need to extract it out of the deb package, you “only” need to package it with RPM then install it into your system.

At that point, I’m no longer qualified enough to help you. Maybe you could ask the rpmfusion folks for help?

Sorry, getting that fingerprint reader to work won’t be an easy adventure :​(