Hello all, I'm a recent convert to libfprint - after having tried pam_bioapi and pam_thinkfinger on my IBM Thinkpad, and I must say that, even at this early stage of libfprint, it seems to work a lot better than the other two solutions - and for that I must commend the author!
Allow me to make a few comments regarding things that aren't quite working as well as expected. I have done a quick search on the archives, and they don't seem to mention some of the issues I'm about to outline here. - gksu A very big problem that afflicts both pam_thinkfinger and pam_bioapi (and most other non-password-based PAM modules) would be incompatibility with gksu. The main factor behind this is that gksu is simply a wrapper around the console based sudo - and isn't capable of interpreting anything but a simple "Password:" prompt from PAM. I have looked into this extensively, and even hacked gksu a little to allow the user to not give up if the first PAM module isn't pam_unix.so, so that it can fallback onto the standard password prompt - but that isn't the most elegant solution. Has the author, or anyone else, put any thought into this - because I'd very much like to solve this problem! - GDM A slight annoyance is that GDM seems to require you to click OK on a prompt that only appears *after* I've logged in - but I think this one has been brought up before, and seems to be a problem with GDM. Any solutions? - Login without username? This was a very useful feature that was possible using pam_bioapi and the UPEK binary driver - by swiping your finger, the module would fill in your username *and* password for you - meaning you could login completely without lifting more than one finger (tee hee!) - is that something that could be done? - pam_gnome_keyring.so This is a module which unlocks the GNOME keyring with the same password as used to login by GDM. But if you're not logging using a password, then obviously this module won't work. An interesting feature I noted with pam_bioapi (though I never did get it to work) was that it claimed to be able to release a password upon fingerprinting - which would be extremely useful in this scenario. Of course, this is very much a wishlist item than anything else that I'm merely putting up for discussion - and of course the most elegant solution would to be to get gnome-keyring to use PAM to begin with. - Visual feedback? Another thing that I rather liked about the UBEK binary was that it could give you visual feedback as to the swiping process (despite it looking pig ugly and windows-like!) - i.e. whether you swiped too fast, whether it was too far left or right, or that it failed - this would be something that would be nice to see, too! I hope I'm not sounding too imposing by demanding all of these features be implemented right away - far from it: I'm just putting them up for discussion - and being a developer myself, would like to contribute, too! Thanks for reading, and please give your comments/feedback/guidance as to how I can help! Thanks, Eddie _______________________________________________ fprint mailing list [email protected] http://lists.reactivated.net/mailman/listinfo/fprint
