Numlock switcher for X
Posted: Fri 23 Oct 2009, 16:03
Dear Puppians,
I had a weird experience today installing Puppy Jaunty on a Packard-Bell EasyNote laptop. A friend was willing to let me trash his pre-installed Vista for Puppy, an opportunity for which I am grateful, coming as it did on the launch day of M$ Win7. He would be an influential Puppy convert/advocate since he is a rector of a university in Germany. Everything went fine except for the Xorg language settings. I have four languages on my three computers and did the same for him. Oddly, whenever I tried typing anything in the three additional languages, I would get crap on the right side of the keyboard, starting with the letter "k". I could not for the life of me figure out what was wrong. Eventually, to our mutual embarrassment, I figured it out: numlock was on by default and there was no indicator lamp to tell us. I looked in the bios for a way to turn it off by default, but the Packard-Bell implementation is a very abbreviated affair with no numlock setting that I could see.
So, I compiled a little program called numlockx, which can toggle the state of that key. It can be placed in root/.xinitrc or in the /root/Startup dir. It knows only two arguments:
Now, everything is all sweetness and light in EasyNote-land. Long live Puppy!
Here is the tiny binary (4k), which I tested in 3.x and 4.x.
With kind regards,
vovchik
I had a weird experience today installing Puppy Jaunty on a Packard-Bell EasyNote laptop. A friend was willing to let me trash his pre-installed Vista for Puppy, an opportunity for which I am grateful, coming as it did on the launch day of M$ Win7. He would be an influential Puppy convert/advocate since he is a rector of a university in Germany. Everything went fine except for the Xorg language settings. I have four languages on my three computers and did the same for him. Oddly, whenever I tried typing anything in the three additional languages, I would get crap on the right side of the keyboard, starting with the letter "k". I could not for the life of me figure out what was wrong. Eventually, to our mutual embarrassment, I figured it out: numlock was on by default and there was no indicator lamp to tell us. I looked in the bios for a way to turn it off by default, but the Packard-Bell implementation is a very abbreviated affair with no numlock setting that I could see.
So, I compiled a little program called numlockx, which can toggle the state of that key. It can be placed in root/.xinitrc or in the /root/Startup dir. It knows only two arguments:
Code: Select all
numlockx on
numlockx off
Here is the tiny binary (4k), which I tested in 3.x and 4.x.
With kind regards,
vovchik
