I had a really annoying problem where I couldn’t get the fingerprint reader working on my Dell XPS 13 after installing Ubuntu 22.04. Turns out there was a bug in the released drivers and Dell hadn’t picked it up when certifying the release for this device. My fingerprint reader is a Goodix Technology one, which doesn’t offer open source drivers itself either so couldn’t fall back to those.

So I eventually found this bug report over on launchpad, where it turns out a fix has been found and released to the staging branch of ubuntu (it was supposed to be included in todays 22.04. release though it didn’t work out the box when I updated).

I had to do a few extra steps to get it working, fist I added the PPA for the pre-release version of the driver (the repository is here):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:andch/staging-fprint

Then I updated and installed the correct version for my fingerprint reader:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install libfprint-2-tod1-goodix libfprint-2-tod1

A quick log out and log back in and the fingerprint reader was working like a dream. I then just had to enable it for sudo which was as simple as running PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) to update it’s config:

sudo pam-auth-update

Use space to toggle and enable ‘Fingerprint authentication’ and your good to go with using your fingerprint to authorise sudo commands.