Bug 87946 took the wrong approach to the wrong component, so that's why this Fedora bug instead of reopening that RedHat bug. Description of problem: Most desktop i86 BIOS' have an option to have the NUM key preset to either the ON state or the OFF state on boot. AFAIK, stock Linux kernels always flip NUM off on startup when the BIOS state is ON. Then, even after boot is complete and the user toggles NUM ON, when he switches to another console (but same keyboard), the state reverts to off. This is confusing to users, and annoyingly inefficient, often resulting in data loss. Compare to the behavior in the various ubiquitous windoze versions, which maintain the BIOS NUM state on boot until such time as that key is pressed. What is needed is not the anachronistic *nix terminal behavior. A PC (normally) has only has one keyboard attached to the motherboard's keyboard port, or to a USB port, and only one user using it. The NUM state should not vary according to whether the user switches among consoles. The state, however set, should be maintained across sessions, and it should be initially set, and maintained, to whatever value is in the BIOS, until such time as the user strikes the NUM key. I'm not about to say how Fedora should accomplish this, but its absence is enough to prevent me recommending Fedora (like RedHat) to anyone. Mandrake installs a package NUMLOCK by default, which almost does the job right. In it, all consoles and wm sessions get and have the state properly set and preserved. The bug is that for some reason it is OFF in X login manager sessions. NAICT, SuSE has a different approach, but the same absent ON state during X login manger sessions. The initial state in SuSE is in the file/etc/sysconfig/keyboard with e.g. 'KBD_NUMLOCK="bios", and like in Mandrake, it is preserved across sessions. Do we want to annoy migrators with an annoyance like this? Windoze doesn't do it. It is no small annoyance to anyone used to using a tenkey machine, like a data input operator or accountant, both of whom input large quantities of numbers by touch typing. Do we not want these people using Fedora? Nearly all desktop keyboards all have a separate cursor section and numpad section. Let's default to optimum use of both of them. How reproducible: 100% Steps to Reproduce: 1.Set BIOS state ON 2.Boot 3.Strike 6345789 on the keypad Actual results: 1.6345789 is not displayed Expected results: 1.6345789 is displayed Additional info: http://home.sw.rr.com/linuxbits/NumLock.html http://ftp.silug.org/pub/ltsp/setnumlock.tar.gz http://caraldi.com/jbq/numlockx/ http://www.freshports.org/x11/numlockx/ http://dforce.sh.cvut.cz/~seli/en/numlockx/ http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/numlockx.html http://www.gentoo.org/dyn/pkgs/x11-misc/numlockx.xml http://slackware.tuxfamily.org/downloads/NumLockX/numlockx-1.0.tar.gz http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/mandrake/9.0/x86_64/Mandrake/RPMS/numlock-2.0-8mdk.x86_64.html
no improvement apparent in FC3 or FC4
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 115909 ***