News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
For those who have computers or laptops with Synaptics / Validity fingerprint sensors, there’s a new pull request contains the driver for libfprint, the default fingerprint library in most Linux Distributions.
As you might know, libfprint has a list of unsupported devices. It includes many Lenovo Thinkpad and HP laptops with 138a and 06cb sensors.
This is a step by step guide shows how to enable fingerprint reader support for Lenovo ThinkPad T480/T480s, X1 Carbon 6th gen, X1 Yoga 3rd gen, X280, etc with 06cb:009a device in Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 25.10, and Ubuntu 26.04.
Ubuntu has fingerprint reader support out-of-the-box using libfprint, and provides option to enable fingerprint login in Users settings page. However, the library has a list of unsupported devices, including 06cb:009a that’s built-in in my used ThinkPad T480s laptop.
Thankfully, there’s a free open-source alternative python-validity that works in my case. Here’s how to install and set it up in Ubuntu 22.04 and higher, while Ubuntu 20.04 is also supported.
UPDATE: For Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, there’s now a patched version of libfprint library to make life easier! See how to section in this tutorial.
First of all, you may press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open up a terminal window.
Then run command to find out the device name of your fingerprint reader:
