numlock at boot

[Paul Morgan]

On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 15:28, Owen Taylor wrote:
> For people who want this feature - I'm wondering if simply having
> the desktop make the value persistant would be a good solution?
> 
>  - If you always want it off, it will stay off
>  - If you always want it on, it will stay on
>  - If you use both, then "the way it was when you logged off"
>    is a pretty good guess for the default value.
> 
> That doesn't help people who want to use the numeric keypad
> on the console, but I think that's a relatively small group.
> And using the numeric keypad on the login screen seems exotic.

It is truly unusual for me to not include at least one numeral in my
passwords, though usually I use more than one numeral.

> 
> In GNOME it would be relatively easy to make gnome-settings-daemon
> track the current value of the numlock key, store it in gconf,
> and then restore on restart.

How about:

in /etc/sysconfig/keyboard: numlock=on|off|bios|last
(on at boot, off at boot, per bios, or "the way it was when you shut
down")

when X starts, gnome or kde or whatever daemon is responsible for
setting numlock would:
if [ -r ~/.keyboard ]; then
  # load this user's preferred layout and numlock
  # thus allowing user settings to override global settings
fi

when X restarts, or vty is respawned, then read global settings from
/etc/sysconfig/keyboard