Hello people! I’m trying to get my laptop’s fingerprint sensor working, to no avail. I’m writing here in hope to find some help or, at least, have somebody confirm that it’s not going to happen.
I got an HP ProBook 440 G5, running Fedora 41 with KDE 6.2. The fingerprint sensor is a Validity Sensors VFS495 (138a:003f), which, as far as I now, has no official drivers for Linux, and is not supported by libfprint (see the official list). However, many users in other forums apparently were able to patch libfprint to work with the device… Here’s what I found:
- According to this post there is a SuSE rpm and some patches that work. The thread has a full guide to recompile libfprint, but it’s written for Slackware, uses a very old version of libfprint, and I’m not knowledgeable enough to apply it to Fedora.
- The patch is based on the code from this github repo, which is abandoned (see issue #8).
- Many other threads on various forums report some success, but they all lead to dead links (mainly this blog post and this repo, which in turns suggests to use rindeal’s repository mentioned above)
I seriously doubt anything above could be applied successfully now, and I am at a loss for any other leads. Does anybody have some experience with this problem, and/or any clue?