fingerprint-auth alone was not enough. /etc/pam.d/kde-fingerprint is written
for a Fedora/authselect layout and its auth stack is two lines: a substack of
fingerprint-auth followed by an include of postlogin. Alpine ships neither.
With only the first supplied, the fingerprint MATCHED and PAM still answered
Permission denied -- the include of a missing service failing after the match
had already succeeded, which is a confusing way to be told a file is absent.
The daemon's own log said MATCH while pamtester said no.
On Fedora postlogin does lastlog and umask bookkeeping. Nothing here needs
that; what is needed is that the seam exists and contributes nothing, so the
stack's result stays the one the fingerprint substack produced. Hence four
optional pam_permit lines and a comment explaining why it is deliberately
empty rather than merely unfinished.
Also observed while testing, and worth knowing before anyone calls this
broken: the lock screen arms fingerprint ONCE when it appears, waits 30
seconds -- pam_fprintd's own timeout -- and then cancels and falls back to a
password. Pressing outside that window reaches nothing at all, and the daemon
records it as `verify: cancelled over 0 press(es)`.
Jorijn van der Graaf
fd244238d0