Setting numlock as ON by default...

KGIII

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This is a really specific article for Lubuntu - but I'm still putting it in General Linux because it's REALLY EASY to extrapolate from this article to your own set up. It's written for Lubuntu, but I'm pretty sure it can work for most any distro.


As always, feedback is appreciated. Your feedback makes better articles, so don't be shy. Also, I noticed a couple of people signed up for the newsletter. Sweet!
 


This exercise is unnecessary because all computers (even the old ones) and maybe even some laptops have an option in BIOS/UEFI for NumLock's state.

numlock-state.png
 
all computers

Nope. Quite a few don't, actually. It's not on this one, my test box, nor on my laptop. It depends on who made your BIOS.
 
This exercise is unnecessary because all computers (even the old ones) and maybe even some laptops have an option in BIOS/UEFI for NumLock's state.

numlock-state.png

My PC has NUMLOCK enabled in the BIOS. It comes on during the boot sequence and worked fine when this PC was running Windows 7 in a prior life, but then I found that Linux turns it off. I had to download and install a utility (numlockx) to have NUMLOCK enabled at the end of the boot sequence. I understand that it's not only my distro (Linux Mint 20) that does this.

I should clarify. "My PC" mentioned above is our 7-year-old machine that had Windows 7 Home on it. It's been sitting around for a year-and-a-half, ever since I bought our "new" refurbished PC with Windows 10 Pro on it. I wiped the hard drive on the old PC and installed Linux Mint on it. I'm writing this post from the Win 10 PC, which is our main PC.
 
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I understand that it's not only my distro (Linux Mint 20) that does this.
I used Mint 18.3 for a little longer than 3 years and never had any problems with NumLock. And I still have none in Arch with Cinnamon. I never had to download any additional packages for it to work in either distro - the option in UEFI I showed above has always been enough.
 
Since embracing Linux in 2010, and exclusively in 2014, I have had it on 6 desktops and 4 laptops.

Knowing about numlockx (as I do) is good information to have on hand.

"Forum Troll" is a person who posts messages to bait people to answer. Trolls often delight in sowing discord on the forums. A troll is someone who inspires flaming rhetoric, someone who is purposely provoking and pulling people into flaming discussion.

I hope you are not becoming a troll, Rado. Wizards don't like trolls, ask my friend Gandalf.

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@wizardfromoz How exactly not ever having to install an additional package on any distro makes me a troll? I'm not seeking to create a discord, I'm just saying there's a way to have numlock working without additional packages. But IDK what that way is bc I'm not a programmer. Otherwise how would you explain that I have numlock automatically set to ON at a fresh installation of Arch? At startup it's off but once I press it to turn it ON, it stays ON at every reboot. Before this topic I didn't even know about the existence of that numlockx package or whatever its name is.
 

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