Can we get his added to the base image? I tried installing via a Fedora distrobox and the box does not have access to the hardware camera and it fails to setup the auth. Plus I also wonder is the box has the nessicary PAM access to support OS authentication. I can’t find an easy way to install it from a COPR via rpm-ostree.
+1
Would also like this as an alternative login option!
This would need to be done on the host in order to have access to the pam stack.
What do you mean by that?
You cannot do this inside of a distrobox.
Yes and that is exactly why it would be nice to have it in the aurora/bluefin/bazzite base image 
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Just wanted to chime in and say that I would also be interested in this coming to Bazzite.
I would also love this option. Although I am using fingerprint login and am prompted for my password anyway when entering GNOME. So I am wondering if this camera based option would just create a similar annoyance.
You can install howdy via copr, I setup howdy already on my bazzite install
# bazzite ships a copr helper script
copr enable principis/howdy-beta
dnf install howdy howdy-gtk
howdy beta is required for config files to be in /etc, which is a writeable directory on bazzite
then you can do something like this:
e.g. update device_path in /etc/howdy/config.ini to /dev/video3
/dev/video3 is the IR camera on the Minisforum v3 tablet
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for future reference, here’s a link to the repo for the copr helper util: GitHub - ublue-os/COPR-command: A small script reenabling the "COPR" command on Fedora distros not including it
Thanks for the info!
On Aurora,
dnf install howdy howdy-gtk
does not work.
Instead I had to use
rpm-ostree install howdy howdy-gtk
Edit:
Also for future reference, here is how to actually enable camera login:
First: run howdy-gtk to add your face to your username.
Then enable howdy for the login:
sudo nano /etc/pam.d/sddm
add following lines to the top:
auth [success=1 new_authtok_reqd=1 default=ignore] pam_unix.so try_first_p>
auth sufficient pam_howdy.so
Now, during login I get asked for a password, but when I just hit the enter key, howdy jumps in and lets me in into my system
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I can’t get any of the above methods to work on Bazzite 42.
Running “copr enable principis/howdy-beta” says theres no such file or directory, so I tried “rpm-ostree install howdy howdy-gtk" which results in a package not found error.
Does someone know anything else I can try? I miss my facial recognition 
I put this together for bluefin: if you want to try it out I’d be interested in your feedback. Since bazzite doesn’t use GDM I would need to make a few additions to get howdy working on that base but it should be easy enough
I’d be willing to try it out on my Bazzite install if you’re willing to make the required changes.
Same, I have a Gnome and KDE install to try it on with Bazzite
Seems to me better to wait before integrating until the beta has become the regular release since current version requires old Python 2 and doesn’t use /etc.
Is the beta even worked on anymore? The last stable release was 2020. If the beta is still being worked on, then why hasn’t a new stable version been released? I’d rather have a beta than nothing at all.
Great! Thank you. I installed bazzite with the gnome and plasma versions and howdy is working fine for me. Here are the images if you want to try to it out:
ghcr.io/rall/bazzite-howdy:stable
ghcr.io/rall/bazzite-dx-howdy:stable
ghcr.io/rall/bazzite-dx-nvidia-howdy:stable
ghcr.io/rall/bazzite-dx-nvidia-gnome-howdy:stable
Hopefully you see your bazzite flavor in that list. If so, just run sudo bootc switch and reboot.
After a reboot you’ll see two new just commands: ujust howdy-pam and ujust howdy-camera-picker
The camera picker is just a convenience for picking the right webcam, or the right stream from your cam that uses infra-red. In the end it’s just going to update your howdy config with the id of whichever cam you choose and you can do that yourself if you want with sudo howdy config
The howdy-pam task will update your pam config for your display manager’s login greeter and/or sudo. The greeter change requires a new selinux module that allows the greeter to talk to video devices, and the just task will queue that for installation on the next reboot.
Obviously changes to the greeter pam config (/etc/pam.d/gdm-password for gnome or /etc/pam.d/sddm for plasma) have the potential to lock you out of your system so if you’re nervous you could check the contents of the relevant file before and after running the just task. I haven’t run into any problems in my testing on bazzite or bluefin but consider that my disclaimer.
Anyway, I hope this helps. Let me know how it goes or if you need any help getting it working.
Richard, thanks for putting this together it is very helpful. Also looks like your build has a few other changes like a desktop picker on login. Can you share all of the customizations you have in this build? How did you accomplish this, very interested in exploring.
Hello Richard, appreciate all your efforts so far to get Howdy working for us Bazzite users! I just recently installed Bazzite on a spare drive for my asus laptop, trying to get all the features to work like they did with windows. Are you able to get Howdy working with the GNOME DE and provide the appropriate image? aka bazzite-gnome-howdy