Re: i386 AT keyboard LED question.

From: Vojtech Pavlik
Date: Mon Feb 20 2006 - 15:55:13 EST


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
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