Most bioses allow you to select whether the machine should boot with numlock on
or off.  I don't want to clutter the UI with items like this.

My BIOS is set to start my machine with the numlock on.

Numlock gets turned off before it reaches the init.d scripts.

It would be nice if the OS honoured the BIOS setting.
Shall I refile?

I believe that the kernel is resetting the Numlock setting.  I would recommend
that you file a new bug against the kernel.  My guess is that the kernel people
will resist changing the current behavior.  Closing as 'notabug' for
redhat-config-keyboard.  Thanks for your report.

I filed a kernel bug (bug 91765). It is a kernel issue, but it raises a bigger
point:

"..In addition it gets more complicated once people start hotplugging USB
keyboards.."
 -- Alan Cox

I can't think of a better place that in redhat-config-keyboard, to allow users
to configure how their keyboard is setup.

If a user attaches a USB keyboard to the system, shouldn't the keyboard start
with user-predefined settings?

This actually is an issue for me as well. I own a Gateway G6-350, and as well as
some several other machines (some older boxes like the G6). One problem seems to
be that some of these older BIOS versions do not offer the ability to turn off a
NUMLOCK switch in the BIOS.

Thus, when I boot up with my IBM Model "M" keyboard (Part number 1395217, made I
think on 04-04-90), then it seems have the keyboard in "NUMLOCK On" mode. Thus I
try to type "linux rescue vga=792", and instead of getting linux, I get "34N5X"!

The simple solution (in my view) for this would be to have the install CD go and
turn numlock off in its initialization procedure, so that when the "Linux:" boot
prompt from the CD-ROM appears, you can type "linux" and not "34n5x". Then there
could be a kernel parameter (such as "NUMLOCK={ON|OFF}" to use once installed on
the hard drive.

I do not know if this is an issue strictly with RedHat (as that is the only real
Linux distribution I use), but it maybe true of SuSE or others too, not sure.


Thanks,

Stuart
Beverly Hills, CA

Sorry, redhat-config-keyboard is for selecting the geographic keymap.  That's
all.  I'm not going to expand the scope of the tool beyond that.  

Keep in mind that the redhat-config-keyboard interface is also used by anaconda
during the initial system install.  It just doesn't make sense to ask users
anything other than what type of keyboard they have (U.S., French, German, etc.)

You can easilly work this around by adding something like

INITTY=/dev/tty[1-8]
for tty in $INITTY; do
 setleds -D +num < $tty
done

to eg. /etc/rc.sysinit or create upstart job.