GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 628954
Remember Num Lock state at shutdown and restore it at boot
Last modified: 2018-05-24 10:27:37 UTC
***Forwarded bug from Ubuntu Launchpad*** This is a pretty trivial bug, but it may be a candidate for future a 100 papercuts cycle. I did try searching to see if it had been reported before, but couldn't find any - apologies if I've missed it! At present, NumLock isn't enabled when you go to log in to Ubuntu, so you have to manually enable it before entering numerical passwords on the number pad. While this isn't a critical issue, it is one that I feel should be fixed. I don't know anyone who uses the number pad for its arrows, and other OSs do enable NumLock by default. Additionally to achieve this behaviour at present requires installing the numlockx package, and manually editing /etc/gdm/Init/Default - which is clearly not appropriate for new users.
Not exactly trivial: while enabling numlock is mostly harmless on a desktop keyboard, on a laptop it frequently makes the keyboard unusable, since the numlock overlays many of the standard keys. Recent changes to the Linux kernel will partly address this problem, by ensuring that the kernel respects the desired numlock state set in the BIOS. (This assumes your BIOS has such a setting.) Ideally, I'd suggest that some system component should save the numlock state at shutdown and restore it on boot; that way, once you toggle it on once, that state will persist until you turn it back off, even if you reboot the system in the meantime.
> Ideally, I'd suggest that some system component should save the numlock state at shutdown and restore it on boot; that way, once you toggle it on once, that state will persist until you turn it back off, even if you reboot the system in the meantime. To clarify, I don't think GDM should do that; I think it makes more sense for some lower-level system component to do that. Perhaps the same bits that handle keymaps for the console.
Why is this not fixed more than 5 years later? I cant enable numlock on boot on my Arch and this workaround is not working anymore. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Activating_Numlock_on_Bootup#GDM
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gdm/issues/33.