From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040929 Firefox/0.10 (Ubuntu) Description of problem: A user in my group has reported that the behaviour of the direction keys on the numpad is inconsistent when numlock is turned off. Home/End/PgUp/PgDn and the arrow keys work fine in some applications (such as gnome-terminal), but do not work in others (programs using GtkHTML widgets such as Evolution's mail composer, Python's idle using the Tkinter library). By not work, I mean: input is silently dropped. There are no scancode errors or similar. I've never seen this problem before, and I'm not sure where to start looking. He is quite keen to rectify this situation, as he apparently doesn't like using the usual 10[1-5] key keyboard direction keys... I'm not sure if this is an X keyboard map configuration problem, or what, so I'm reporting it in the xorg-11 package. I hope it doesn't get lost in the noise. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): xorg-x11-6.7.0-9 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Use default 105-key keyboard map, as selected during default FC2 x86_64 install. 2. Turn off numlock. 3. Open gnome-terminal, type in garbage, use direction keys on numpad to move around. 4. Open idle, type in garbage, attempt to use direction keys on numpad to move around. It fails. Actual Results: I, the group's sysadmin, get hassled. I've got exams coming up! Expected Results: The direction keys on the numpad should function in the same manner as the dedicate direction keys. Additional info:
Edward, I have some info on this. 1) I do not think think that "inconsisitent" does the problem justice -- it is 100% consistent, key presses when numlock is off are ALWAYS dropped. So I think the following summary is more accurate: "input from numeric pad always dropped when numlock off". 2) I have been having the same problem on i386 using CentOS-3, which is derived from RHEL 3. So the problem is not confined to fedora, and is not confined to x86_64. 3) Idle does not have this problem when running in Windows. So the problem may be more pervasive than you thought. This problem has been driving me nuts for months, but this is the first time I have hit anything on point with Google searches.
Edward, Now I understand what you meant by "inconsistent" -- the numeric keypad direction keys work OK in some applications but not in others. For IDLE, I put in a bug in SourceForge (where all Python bugs are tracked), Request ID 1074333. If we push on this from both ends, it may get fixed quicker. https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php Since this went in specifically under IDLE, I used the summary "input from numeric pad always dropped when numlock off". I cannot add i386 to the platform here -- bugzilla said no, only the owner can do that. Thanks, Rick Graves
Since this bugzilla report was filed, there have been several major updates to the X Window System, which may resolve this issue. Users who have experienced this problem are encouraged to upgrade to the latest version of Fedora Core, which can be obtained from: http://fedora.redhat.com/download If this issue turns out to still be reproduceable in the latest version of Fedora Core, please file a bug report in the X.Org bugzilla located at http://bugs.freedesktop.org in the "xorg" component. Once you've filed your bug report to X.Org, if you paste the new bug URL here, Red Hat will continue to track the issue in the centralized X.Org bug tracker, and will review any bug fixes that become available for consideration in future updates. Setting status to "CURRENTRELEASE".