Did I break the FW16 Fingerprint Reader by changing my username?
Hi, I am new to using Linux as a Desktop experience. When installing Bazzite (w/ KDE) on my Framework 16 a few weeks ago, the "username" and "name" fields got switched up. Recently, it's been bugging me enough to try and change these around. When trying this initially, the settings window complained that resources were being used by another process (which I looked up to be systemd). It still changed the "display name" thing though.
So what I did was:
- I created an admin user "tempuser"
- logged out
- switched to tempuser
- ran sudo usermod -l newname -d /home/newname -m oldname
- logged back in or restarted
- Deleted tempuser
- Found out some stuff was not working, which I kinda expected though. Lutris said everything was missing for example, so I changed the prefixes. Found that profile picture and wallpapers werent set anymore, changed these aswell.
- (Probably restarted again here)
- created a symlink from /home/oldname to /home/newname in hopes that other issues could be fixed by this (Like Dolphin (the file explorer) complaining that all standard shortcuts like documents and downloads were broken)
- restarted
Only now, I realized that I 1. dont have any fingerprints saved anymore and 2. can't create new ones becuase the fingerprint reader apparently doesnt react to anything I do anymore. Any advice on how I would debug this or solve this issue? (I'd rather spend a day completely reinstalling the system when I have time than to try to go back and potentially break things even more.)
Solution:
Jump to solution
And this theory seems correct! It looks like you need to manually delete the fingerprint on the "old" username and enroll a new one if you rename. (Im just gonna ignore that big red error on the top)
14 Replies
It's difficult to know exactly what you did that broke things. I suspect the issue occurred when you created the symlink from the /home/oldname to /home/newname as the files are owned by different users.
* I'd try make a new user via the UI then see if you can get your fingerprint scanner working for that user.
* If all works, copy personal files from your old user into the new user, remember to change the ownership of the files with
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /path/to/folder/copied otherwise the files will be there but your new user will not have access to them.
* Preferably don't copy all files over to the new user as you'll probably reproduce the issue and break the new user.I have now created a new user, restarted the system and tried to setup a fingerprint for it, but that didn't work either, I'm stuck on the "Please repeatedly press your finger on the fingerprint sensor" popup.
Interestingly enough, When I do
fprintd-list oldname there is a finger in the listwhats wrong with uid 1000
yea sucks
is the fprintdaemon running?
sudo systemctl status fprintd.serviceIt is running. My active theory would be that I couldn't enroll a new fingerprint because the reader sees that it's the same as the old one? I guess it wouldn't hurt running
fprintd-delete oldname..Solution
And this theory seems correct! It looks like you need to manually delete the fingerprint on the "old" username and enroll a new one if you rename. (Im just gonna ignore that big red error on the top)
maybe you need to reset the scanner as well
For that big red error on the screenshot? How would I do that
uh i used to have a laptop with a fingerprint scanner while i used kde
but it broke
so i cant check for you
does kde have fingerprint support now?
It did ever since I set it up
So I asssume 6.0?
does the lockscreen work?
Yes, unless its the first login after boot
wow thats ground breaking
they pulled all the stops with 6+
year of the linux desktop
Turns out, the usergroup also was not renamed and the symlink I created was owned by root. I fixed that now with a
chown on both the symlink and the folder, just like you instructed. Thank you very much for the advice!
Anyway, since the fingerprint issue seems resolved, I am marking this as solved now, thanks again all for the help!