Re: i386 AT keyboard LED question.

[Nick Warne <nick@linicks.net>]

On Monday 20 February 2006 20:24, Vojtech Pavlik wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 08:03:26PM +0000, Nick Warne wrote:
> > Hi Vojtech,
> >
> > I wondered why numlock LED goes off during boot process, even though I
> > ask BIOS to turn on;

~snip~

> Some old notebooks forget them on, which makes the keyboard unusable -
> you get '4' instead of 'u', etc.

Understand.  I never thought of that!

>
> We can't read the LED state anyway (except for going to the BIOS data
> structures, which isn't reasonable from the atkbd driver), and we need
> to initialize it, so off is the safer default.
>
> Further, this has been the behavior of Linux since it was first
> implemented, and thus, in my rewrite of the keyboard handling, I didn't
> change it.

Thanks for detailed reply - I see now, and didn't know any of this.

> It's trivial to change the default lock state in init scripts / xdm
> config / X config, too.

I boot into init 3, so as I don't reboot much, I always forget to turn numlock 
back on when logging in [failed] - hence the question.

I will look at a local fix rather than a patch for kernel.

Thanks again,

Nick
-- 
"Person who say it cannot be done should not interrupt person doing it."
-Chinese Proverb