How to access the finger print driver

Question

Can I access my laptop finger print driver using Java? I am using Fedora as my OS ? Are there any supporting libraries available for java to doing this or Can i do this with C/C++ languages?

Answer 1

Short answer, no probably not.

Long answer, your fingerprint scanner on your laptop has specific drivers built for it by the manufacturer for specific operating systems. You need to find an open source version of those drivers for your specific operating system. Since you're on Linux, there's a relatively good chance that those open source drivers exist and you can download them.

After retrieving the source code for the drivers, you'll need to access them from Java. If the drivers are written in C, this means writing your own C interface and accessing your C interface with Java Native Interface (JNI).

The problem with this is that you have to compile the driver's source code and your own interface for each operating system and architecture you plan on using your code with (x32 and x64, Windows, Mac, Linux, etc) and then dynamically choose the correct library to load at runtime.

If this is just a side project for the heck of it, I'd say jump in and try to find open source drivers for your fingerprint scanner, and start getting familiar with C and JNI if you aren't already.

If this is for a larger project, you need to be pretty careful about licensing issues with whatever drivers you find.