Turning Number Lock ON on Boot in Slackware

Posted by: Andrew Smith
Poster contact info: andrew-smith at mail ru
Author: Ace, Peter
Originally published: http://www.slackwarehelp.org/about254.html http://www.dirac.org/linux/qa/qa-x.html
Software: Linux All, Slackware All

Well are you wondering why the devil linux turns the numlock light off right after it starts booting? Sorry I don't know, but I know how to make it come back on :)

These instructions are mostly distro-independent, the only exception is the location and name of the rc.local file (it's a script that runs last at boot).

Edit your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file. Add this to it:
echo -n "Turning NumLock ON... "
for tty in /dev/tty[1-9]*; do
setleds -D +num < $tty
done
echo "done."

Thank you ace for sharing this little bit of code!

Now, you will notice that the number lock is on in the consoles but not in X (I hear some newer version of KDE fixed this but not Gnome or XFCE or any other window manager). Sadly, to fix this you need to download and install a program :( called numlockx. Look for it on freshmeat.net. Just follow the instruction and you're done.

On my slackware 10.1 I did:
make
make install
make xsetup
make xinitrc

and rebooted, worked great.

Have fun everyone :)