Validity fingerprint sensor 06cb:009a on Lenovo X1 Carbon running EndeavourOS

Doing this on Endeavour was actually easier than in Fedora and really just consisted of a couple of steps, install the Python Validity drivers from the AUR repo, then enable them and reset the firmware.

This is really a follow up post to my previous one about getting the fingerprint sensor working correctly on my Lenovo X1 Carbon under Fedora, but as I like to switch my work laptop around, I’m now running EndeavourOS, based off Arch.

Arch actually have on their wiki some quite comprehensive details on various laptops, including my Lenovo X1

Doing this on Endeavour was actually easier than in Fedora and really just consisted of a couple of steps, install the Python Validity drivers from the AUR repo, then enable them and reset the firmware.

$ yay -S python-validity
$ sudo validity-sensors-firmware
$ sudo python3 /usr/share/python-validity/playground/factory-reset.py

After that it was a straightforward enrollment of my fingerprints

$ fprintd-enroll -f right-index-finger
$ fprintd-enroll -f left-index-finger

After that, it was just a case of checking that fingerprint login is enabled in settings under the user section.

Validity fingerprint sensor 06cb:009a on Lenovo X1 Carbon running Fedora

I’ve been using Linux on my work laptop for a while now, but found I really missed having the fingerprint sensor for login and authentication. I tried sometime last year in Ubuntu to get it working, but as I’d just switched to Fedora, (because why not?) I thought I’d have another go.

So in really brief form, and apologies if I’ve missed anything here, the steps I took to get my fingerprint sensor working on my Lenovo X1 Carbon under Fedora 34 were as follows:


Grab RPM packages from this post – https://github.com/uunicorn/python-validity/issues/54#issuecomment-727092786 and extract RPMs from the zip files

Install RPMs
$ sudo dnf install python3-validity-0.12-1.fc33.noarch.rpm open-fprintd-0.6-1.fc33.noarch.rpm fprintd-clients-1.90.1-2.fc33.x86_64.rpm fprintd-clients-pam-1.90.1-2.fc33.x86_64.rpm

Create two missing files that don’t get created
$ sudo touch /usr/share/python-validity/backoff && sudo touch /usr/share/python-validity/calib-data.bin

Find driver file in the install folder, in my case there is driver named: “6_07f_lenovo_mis_qm.xpfwext”, so change the permissions on that
$ cd /usr/share/python-validity && ls -la
$ sudo chmod 755 6_07f_lenovo_mis_qm.xpfwext

Reset the fingerprint sensor, as this had been used previously
$ sudo systemctl stop python3-validity
$ sudo validity-sensors-firmware
$ sudo python3 /usr/share/python-validity/playground/factory-reset.py

Start the sensor package again and set to run at boot
$ sudo systemctl enable python3-validity && sudo systemctl start python3-validity

Check the validity package has started correcty
$ sudo systemctl status python3-validity

If the service is all running ok, then go ahead and enroll your fingerprints
$ fprintd-enroll

At this point it let me enroll my fingerprints, so go ahead and enable fingerprints as a login method and then I had the fingerprint sensor working and could use them for login to both Gnome and for sudo at the terminal
$ sudo authselect enable-feature with-fingerprint

Sources
https://github.com/uunicorn/python-validity/issues/54#issuecomment-727092786
https://github.com/uunicorn/python-validity#errors-on-startup
https://github.com/uunicorn/python-validity/issues/3
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1943406