The fingerprint reader in the ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2017 has hardware ID 138a:0097. Unfortunately, the official fingerprint management module under Linux doesn’t support this thing at all. Plenty of people online have been reverse engineering it to make the module usable under Linux, but after all that tinkering it still feels pretty awkward. There was once a solution that patched libfprint, but it only worked for about half a year. Then libfprint 2.0 came out and the original patch bit the dust. Recently, though, someone solved the problem with a new approach: they wrote a fingerprint manager and driver directly in Python, replacing the dumb libfprint, and it works. Thanks to uunicorn and Marco and the other people behind the scenes.

The fingerprint reader in the ThinkPad X250 has the same hardware ID as the X240: 138a:0017 Shame is, that ID still doesn’t seem to be supported in the stock libfprint. Good thing someone forked it and added drivers for newer devices. Before that we need fingerprint-gui installed, without it there’s no fingerprint login or any of that: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fingerprint/fingerprint-gui sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install libbsapi policykit-1-fingerprint-gui fingerprint-gui