As always all good things have to end sometime, so went my bioapi when I replaced my SuSE with Fedora 7. The reason to switch to Fedora was forced upon me by the all famous evil MicroSoft with its all famous MSN version upgrade. As I hacked the Kopete as much I could the old libs in SuSE were not just up to the task of plain rebuild to a newer version.
After backing up the usuals about a week ago I reinstalled my laptop. No big deal. Around half an hour of installation, another half a hour to strip all of the gnome components and yum junk and another 2 hours of installing and configuration of KDE. All was well untill I remembered the most important thing - I didn't backup my own rpm's. And this included the bioapi and the pam module. After about 20 times entering the password for screen saver the old finger swiping reflex started to come back. Crap...
Oh well - I had to start from the beginning.
The first thing to do is the bioapi lib's. Everything is straight forward until I started packaging it. Google was no help - the best thing google could offer was the "--with-Qt-dir=no" configure option, but that was not acceptable for me. I needed the Qt for my screen saver so after little debugging I found the evil source of the Qt compile errors. It is an rpm macro
# here is a hack
# in /usr/lib/rpm/rpmrc line 18
# replace optflags: i386 -O2 -g -march=i386 -mcpu=i686
# with optflags: i386 -O2 -g -march=i386
Every time when compiling the configure test part spitted out error messages about mcpu being deprecated and the test failed.
As I'm low on time for the time being I just used the hack and Bingo - every test was passed successfully.
As this is literally an hack I wont be using it for other packages until needed again, but basically its biapi's testing problem and currently I don't have time to start fixing it. The i386 rpm is here and the source rpm is here. One day I will move the udev rules the the bioapi package, but not right now.
Ok, so everything should be set to run the bioapi right? Well, not really - the one thing that I had totally forgotten was the UPEK inc. tfmss bsp api. This was the most frustrating thing as I had forgotten about it totally. As it is distributed under property license and it seems everyone have drawn back their binary and source packages I'll just publish the spec to build the rpm and the config. It seems that UPEK is forcing their license, so here is the spec and here is the configuration fail. A simple rpmbuild will build the package that can be installed. For licensing read the SDK EULA, and thus I'm not responsible for whatever you do after building the package - this information is provided AS IS, without any warranty by the packager.
The final thing is the pam_bioapi package. This packaged nicely without any hiccups. But then the problems started. It seems that the new version of the module is only capable of using SQLlite3 back end and not the old flat bir file based back end (atl east I dint find an option to enable it). Thus I'm still without a working bioapi. Oh well - back to the old reliable 0.2.1 it went. After little patching it built nicely. But the problems did not end - I started to get bioapi errors. "BioAPI error #194d" - google did not give any good answer to it except it is a permissions error. After some debugging I found out that the error is cosed by wrong permissions on the usb fingerprint reader device. By default it is owned by root and writable by user root - naturally I'm not a root on everyday tasks so I did some magic and got it running. To make the changes permanent I wrote a little udev rule that makes the device to be owned by group "fingerprint" and made it writable by the group so it started to work nicely. Here is the rpm and here is the source rpm.
I also included a mini "howto" on how to get it to work fast and easy. I also may be missing some libs and deps from the packages as my systems are always bloated with libs and development headers, but the examples are here, so have fun everybody.
Some useful links allso: udev rule writing, file permissions in linux, a good howto on enabling fingerprint reader, the bioapi error I mentioned before, another error symptom, Novell way of doing things, the TFMSS fingerprint reader api.
Thats about it for today - have fun and play nice :)
PS! Great thanks the the people in UPEK for releasing the Linux port for the fingerprint reader api :)
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