From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6 Description of problem: My BIOS is set so that numlock should be on. When Red Hat has finished booting, it is not on. Windows had no problem. How reproducible: Always Additional info: Originally filed as bug 87946.
At which point does the light go out?
It's difficult to say - but one of the messages I read as the lines of text flashed passed mentioned that the ramdisk driver had been initiliased. So, after grub and before init runs.
The kernel resets Num Lock. The comments in code mention that on some laptops, Num Lock switched on causes keys uiojklm,. (or other near keys) to act as a numeric keypad instead of letters. I have no idea whether this is true though.
Its one of those "religious" issues. Red Hat could decide to do different things to the mainstream but for such a minor item it is not clear it is helpful. In addition it gets more complicated once people start hotplugging USB keyboards..