On Thu, Apr 18, 2002 at 01:44:44AM -0700, Joey Karalius wrote: > I have a few questions for the group: > > 1) How do I get NUM-LOCK to stay on when re-booting (Linux, of course)? > I thought it was only a BIOS thing but apparently not, since it stays > on when Windows boots up, but not Linux.
That's a new one... never thought of this as a issue, but apparently this is a _very_ a frequent newbie question. It seems that the Linux kernel clears all led settings when the keyboard driver starts (maybe by resetting the keyboard). Some people reboot often enough that they find hitting one additional key after each reboot is annoying. So an answer for Debian is... ============================= add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list ===== # numlock and xsetleds deb http://www.fwdn.de/debian/ ./ deb-src http://www.fwdn.de/debian/ ./ ====== type "apt-get update; apt-get install numlock"... and from now on when your machine boots and when you log into X the numlock keys will be defaulted on. (the console script is much like below... but only touches the first 8 consoles if you have more you should modify the /etc/init.d/numlock file to fix it, as mentioned below). For everyone else... ==================== There are two answers the easy one for the console and is easy... somewhere your .bash_login add a command like: case `tty` in /dev/tty[0-9]*) setleds +num ;; esac or if you want it system wide put something like the following into the boot-up scripts: for l in /dev/tty[0-9]*; do setleds -num < $l; done Now if you want to do this for X windows the process is different... the funny thing is that the "xset" program which is supposed to be able to toggle the leds and I've used in the past doesn't appear to work on my particular machine. I find hundreds of web pages involving this thing, some distributions appear to have builtin support for setting them a particular way on boot (it appears they have lilo append "numlock=on" to the linux boot line and do something with that in the bootup scripts), some distributions have packages you can install that turn them on, and for the rest there are a bunch of programs that you can download and compile that do the magic look for "xsetleds" or "numlockx" and you should find something related to this. > 2) I bought a serial external modem, and I'm shopping for a cable. It > has the 25-pin connection on the back and I think I want to go with the > USB to serial cable, since I have a couple empty USB ports. Is there > any reason I can't go with that setup? A tricky one I haven't seen any systems doing this... but it should work. The concept of "a cable to convert old serial devices to a completely different modern universal serial bus connector", is valid... I have personally messed with some of these cables for talking to serial printers, one actually worked. Besides the fun of messing with this method, the only reason I can imagine for going this way is if you really don't have a old serial port available. The important thing is to get a USB to serial converter cable that has a supported driver... many types exist, and in 2.4.18 about 16 kernel drivers exist for different types of serial converter, most are marked experimental (so you will need to check "Prompt for development drivers" to even see them when compiling the kernel). It's a vague memory but if you have USB configured properly when you plug in the device it will be added to the "known devices with loaded drivers list" somewhere in /proc/bus/usb ... and you will run whatever program to use the serial port on a /dev/ttyUSB* or /dev/usb/tts/* file... look at /usr/src/linux/Documentation/usb/usb-serial.txt for more info. Later, Mike _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
