Re: [Usability] Fingerprint reader

[Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org>]

Am Samstag, den 03.06.2006, 15:44 +0200 schrieb Maurizio Colucci:
> Hi,
> Yesterday, when I had a friend of mine try the new Ubuntu, I had an
> unpleasant suprise: he laughed at me when he saw me type the password
> by hand. It seems he has been using a fingerprint reader under
> Windows, for more than a year now. 
> 
> I realized this is a feature that he will not do without, now he has
> gotten used to it. 
> 
> It seems the advantage under GNU/Linux would be even greater, since
> GNU/Linux requires you to type passwords more often than Windows. 
> 
> Is there some way to use a fingerprint reader to type passwords with
> Gnome? (My guess is it isn't, and that some work would be needed at
> the level of gksu and gdm.) 
> 
> I have no real point however, I only wished to inform you about this.
> Cheers 

I filed an Ubuntu spec some months ago:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FingerprintAuthentication

All the tools seem to be available already. As soon as the framework is
in place, we'll adapt the GNOME stack to support it, creating a
configuration and authentication UI, and gnome-keyring integration. I
contacted the BioAPI packager Michael R. Crusoe some time ago to ask him
whether he will split up the packages a bit, but I didn't get any
response so far.