SOLVED: Fingerprint Reader no longer working on Fedora after "Windows to go" boot

[Gabriel_K]

Hello, I have a strange problem that I haven’t been able to find anywhere here or elsewhere. I’m on Fedora 35 Silver Blue Gnome 41, and so far it’s a flawless.

I had the fingerprint reader working just fine, then decided to create a VM of Windows 11 in my Virtual Machine Manger. After getting that working, I used that instance to create a “Windows to go” image on a usb, restarted and booted up W11, updated the drivers using Frameworks own driver package. It works great!

But ever since I did that, I’ve broken the finger print scanner in Fedora. The error message I get using the GUI:

“framework” failed to claim device: GDBus.Error:net.reactivated.Fprint.Error.Already In Use: Device was already claimed

When I run:

systemctl stop fprintd.services

I’m able to start again, but this time it says “Device is disconnected”. Running it from the command line produces a similar result:

fprintd-enroll -f right-index-finger userme
Enroll result: enroll disconnected

Whats frustrating, is lsusb lists it as a device, and fprint-list userme shows I don’t have any fingerprints enrolled, so it’s clearly detecting it.

Not sure what I did wrong. I tried going back to a few versions prior at boot, and same result. What I’d like to do is completely disable it for all windows, clear the fprint data and start again. I disabled it in W11 as well, and same result. Apologies for the sloppy post; formatting is tough in this forum since there’s no preview.

[gclimer]

This has been happening to several people who are dual booting.

Check this out -

[TRACKING] Fingerprint scanner compatibility with linux (ubuntu, fedora, etc)

@snee (and anyone else) First of all, clone this repository: git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/devyn/libfprint.git --branch goodixmoc-clear-storage To build, you will need several dependencies, but to start you’ll need meson and ninja as well as the usual gcc setup. Once you have that, run: mkdir build meson setup build Meson will tell you if you have any missing dependencies. For each one, install it and then run meson setup build again until it succeeds. On Ubuntu/Debian, you will …

[2disbetter]

I believe this has to do with the WIndow’s driver for the fingerprint reader. (Witch is Goodix’s responsibility and not Microsoft’s) It is specifically locking the dreader to work with Windows. I say this because I don’t think if you are dual booting different Linux distros the same thing is happening. If it then it is a hardware limitation (and a good one as it prevents some exploits).

AS mentioned in a post above, you can reset the reader, and blank its fingerprint memory to use with Linux, if you set it up in Windows.

[Gabriel_K]

For anyone curious, just follow the suggestion from @snee and you should be good to go. If you scroll a bit further on that thread, @Devyn_Cairns posted a link to an appimage that ultimately did the trick.