My laptop has a fingerprint sensor. Making it work with i3lock however, requires additional work. We need to configure the PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module).

Put the following config in /etc/pam.d/i3lock:

#
# PAM configuration file for the i3lock screen locker. By default, it includes
# the 'login' configuration file (see /etc/pam.d/login)
#

auth sufficient pam_unix.so try_first_pass likeauth nullok
auth sufficient pam_fprintd.so timeout=10
auth include login

Here is what happens:

• It first tries to unlock using a password.
• If not, it returns to scanning the fingerprint with a timeout of 10 seconds.

With this config, there is no way for PAM to efficiently know when to scan for fingerprint. So you have to first press enter before scanning your fingerprint. It’s not optimal, but it gets the job done.

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