Re: i386 AT keyboard LED question.

[Vojtech Pavlik <vojtech@suse.cz>]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 08:51:51PM +0000, Nick Warne wrote:
> 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.
 
The 'setleds' command in boot.local might be the fix you're looking for.

-- 
Vojtech Pavlik
Director SuSE Labs