[ILUG] num lock in vconsoles

[Andy Ferguson]

On Sun, 28 Nov 1999, Christian J van den Bosch wrote:

> anybody know how to get numlock to default to on in all vconsoles as
> well as in X? I hate having to turn it on for each one individually
> (yep, I am a _very_ lazy git)


You want a program called setleds. It should be run during your
system boot so add some appropriate calls in one of the boot files
in /etc/rc.d

If you use SuSE (v6+ but maybe earlier) Yast allows you to set a
couple of variables that do this for you; set them by changing the
config file.

#---<start boot.setup fragment>---------------------------

#! /bin/sh
#
        # setleds
        if test "$KBD_NUMLOCK" = "yes"; then
                LEDOPT="+num"
        else
                LEDOPT="-num"
        fi 
        if test "$KBD_CAPSLOCK" = "yes"; then
                LEDOPT="$LEDOPT +caps"
        else
                LEDOPT="$LEDOPT -caps"
        fi  
        if test -n "$KBD_NUMLOCK" -a -n "$KBD_CAPSLOCK" -a \
                -x /usr/bin/setleds ; then
                cd /dev || exit 1
                if test -z "$KBD_TTY"; then
                        KBD_TTY="tty[1-9]*"
                fi
                for tty in $KBD_TTY; do
                        /usr/bin/setleds -D $LEDOPT < $tty
                done
        fi

#---<end fragment>----------------------------------------

This fragment uses a few env variables loaded as the system boots; these are
        KBD_NUMLOCK     turn numlock on or off
		KBD_CAPSLOCK    turn capslock on or off
		KBD_TTY         ttys the above two should be applied to
an alternative would be to call setleds directly with
        setleds -D +num < tty01
		setleds -D +num < tty02
or better still use the fragment in the setleds man page.

This will not apply to X sessions started through xdm or similar
(setleds only works on vconsoles). possibly there is an Xresource
which can be set


Andy Ferguson
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sysop MOIL BBS +44-1247-273357