MEPIS Community Forum

As this problem has bugged me for a while I was wondering about the whole process. Perhaps now that Numlock ON can be demonstrated as solved for many but the Numlock indicator still does not show true state. Are there two processes at work, one for the key's action and another for it's indicator?

Using the Gkrellm program's 'LED' keyboard indicators it's possible to make the Numlock and it's indicator behave in various ways, even ideally, but the ideal .i.e light on Numlock on doesn't seem to survive a reboot. So it is possible to alter things to the 'right' way but why won't this stick?

My Natural Pro is the old PS/2 version. I would suspect a difference in motherboard chipsets. I have a 965G-based motherboard. It's almost as old as the keyboard.
I'll plug in my 'new model' Natural Pro Elite and see if it makes a difference. I only bought the new one so that I could clean the old one easily in my dishwasher. (Top rack, no soap, 3 days to dry.)

You wash your keyboard in the dishwasher !!!

To confirm:
My Microsoft Natural Pro indicates NumLock correctly without Numlockx. This has not always been the case and is not the case with all distros.
The current install is of Mepis.11. upgraded to KDE. 4.6.5. The numlock is on, led lit and working. Bios set to numlock on, system settings,keyboard,numlock set to on.

Will try a fresh 11.00 later to check that.

NS.

EDIT: Just booted to a clean Mepis.11. and it 'no worky' with the same settings.

My M$ Comfort Curve 2000 instructions say that it's liquid-proof, and it needs a clean so... ma going to try that.
I know that it it won't affect the Numlock LED as that's on the separate wireless receiver.

Using various keyboards on this machine with "Windows" and other Linux flavours proves to me that the
Numlock function and it's indicator behavior can be good, but not unfortunately with Mepis 11.

I should mention that I had the keyboard on its side in the top rack.
I did this because I had read of it being done and my space bar was not 'spacing' reliably. I didn't trust it 100% so the backup keyboard was ordered. (couldn't find it locally)

That's interesting NoSavvy...the numlock led was working when you were running KDE. 4.6.5 and quit working when you did a fresh Mepis install with KDE 4.5.3. Maybe it is a KDE issue?

janthree

Are there any update downloads that can fix this issue yet. I mean besides the manual fix indicated earlier. I was surprised to find this issue when I installed Mepis. I was always under the impression that Debian was so well tested. I was surprised to see something like this in a Debian based distro. Its these little things that I keep finding in Linux distros that always bother me.

I haven't seen any update or download personally but at least my numlock now works as follows after boot up;
Numlock is off and LED is off.

At least that way I can switch Numlock on manually and have the indicator LED show that it is on. Just like it was back in the 1980's! My BIOS has no setting for Numlock also like way back when...

I agree about Debian and likewise about other distros, Linux can be frustrating in infinitely different ways. I really doubt that it will ever be any other way.

Looking through this post the common denominator is a MS keyboard, so I take it you have set your system to use a MS keyboard in System Settings, the settings are there for a very good reason, which has nothing to do with Debian or any other OS.