Randomly engaging NumLock considered irritating

March 24, 2007

Dear Fedora Core 6 X server: please stop randomly turning my NumLock on. It's getting really old by now, especially since I use a BTC-5100C mini keyboard and so turning NumLock on sprinkles numbers around my typing instead of the letters that I expected.

(It also makes various fvwm2 operations not fire, since I'm not hitting shift+alt+mouse button, I'm 'hitting' shift+alt+numlock+mouse button. I'd tell fvwm2 to ignore the state of NumLock entirely, except it currently serves as a useful cue to me that hey, NumLock got turned on again.)

Perhaps this is some accessibility feature that I am accidentally waking up, but it seems unlikely; I'm running in a bare session, without the usual Gnome or KDE stuff started up. Nor is there any apparent pattern for when it happens, although it happens fairly infrequently and I probably don't notice it right away when it does.

PS: this is unlikely to be hardware failure since it is happening on two machines, although both have BTC-5100C keyboards. (I really like them.)


Comments on this page:

From 70.49.25.203 at 2007-03-25 09:38:52:

Something turns NumLock on on one of the KVMs in our machine room, really irritating. There's an FC machine on it, but I don't think it runs 6 - I should faff around and see if switching to that particular machine and then to somewhere else turns it on. At least my userid includes characters that wind up being mapped to numbers, so I see right away.

- Mike
By cks at 2007-03-26 00:25:31:

There's a decent number of reports of KVMs doing odd things to keyboard state (and I'm pretty certain I've seen it with KVMs myself), but in this case I'm directly connected to both machines.

(I probably should have mentioned this explicitly in the original entry, but it slipped my mind.)

Written on 24 March 2007.
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Last modified: Sat Mar 24 14:00:59 2007
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