Enabling the fingerprint reader on my Dell 5750 in Ubuntu 24.04

July 11th at 7:15am

It's been a few months since Ubuntu 24.04 dropped and its time I upgraded to the latest LTS from Canonical. My Dell 5750 has 2 SSDs which lets me 'upgrade' via fresh install while leaving my previous release untouched. After installing 24.04 I ran into an issue that I've seen before: the fingerprint scanner (27c6:533c Shenzhen Goodix Co., Ltd. Fingerprint) was not recognized.

Fortunately the fix was straight forward enough, once I found the key

References:

Background

Ubuntu 24.04 is new enough that there doesn't appear to be an 'OEM' installation path available for Dell laptop. This means that I can't readily/easily enable a Dell Ubuntu repository and quickly install the packages that I need. Fortunately for me, at this point my system is old enough that I don't need many drivers - in fact, it appears that I am only lacking the fingerprint driver. After a few quick web queries I was able to track down some reasonably complete information on where to find the driver.

My dell is equipped with a Goodix fingerprint reader. When running lsusb it looks like this:

Bus 001 Device 002: ID 27c6:533c Shenzhen Goodix Technology Co.,Ltd. FingerPrint

Solution

This worked for my x86-64 based Dell Precision 5750:

    sudo dpkg -i libfprint-2-tod1-goodix_0.0.6-0ubuntu1~somerville1_amd64.deb
  • Restart my laptop
  • Enroll fingerprints

Fortunately a fairly straight forward operation overall, once the location of the driver was identified