Felix Miata composed on 2025-01-06 22:06 (UTC-0500): > That's what it's doing for me.
> I've been multibooting for over 3 decades, accumulating many PCs over the > years > that I use for hardware support. I now have somewhat in excess of 40 that are > kept > up to date at least to some degree. Only two are laptops, both very old, and > both > used rarely, and with external keyboards. > Originally multiboot here was solely via IBM Boot Manager, then when I started > with linux, I was quickly turned off of LILO and onto Grub. I was particularly > enamored by SUSE's implementation of gfxboot that I very slightly customized. > It > was the only GNU bootloader I employed, a strong believer in the concept of > one > bootloader per PC is all that is needed, and used only it to boot everything > GNU. > I was turned off by Grub2 when it appeared, for various reasons, and have > continued to use legacy Grub on all legacy BIOS PCs. Only several years after > acquiring my first UEFI PC did I begin booting via UEFI, and only then did I > begin > using Grub2, naturally, in its EFI incarnation. And I got used to it by > employing > custom.cfg and copying 41_custom to 07_custom to place my stanzas at menu's > top. > I'm a touch typist. I'm also a former CPA, one of a significant group of > people > who learn to touch type at least on a adding machine/calculator, and thus on a > 101-key style keyboard. Typing 6 or 8 numbers before realizing something > turned > off NUM is a highly annoying and recurring problem. One of the reasons I was > attracted to openSUSE (as SuSE) more than two decades ago is it made keeping > NUM > enabled simple compared to most other distros that I had sampled. After a > while I > managed to get most to be cooperative, though at this point I remember none of > what it took to make it happen in Fedora or Debian and derivatives. > In part due to > <https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/grub-legacy-delay-of-more-than-2-minutes-loading-initrd-from-ext4-filesystem-4175599620/>, > last > Wednesday I began a migration of one of the legacy PCs from a MBR SSD to GPT > SSD, > and thus, abandon legacy Grub for Grub2. Yesterday I finished to find roughly > half > the installations get NUM turned off by Grub's loading of their kernels and/or > initrds. I double checked, and the stats are: ... > Questions: > 1-Is it known that Grub2 for legacy/BIOS booting turns off NUM? > 2-Is it intentional that Grub2 turns off NUM? > 3-Is there a way I can get Grub2 to either flip NUM on instead of off, or > just not > touch it? Apparently I forgot I found a solution for this more than 5 years ago, forgot about it, and failed in recent searches to rediscover it. The solution has nothing to do with Grub*, and I now seriously doubt Grub plays any part in this kernel hatred of bookkeepers and accountants. The solution for (systemd systems): 1: In /etc/systemd/system/, create a service file: [Unit] Description=numlock [Service] ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/numlock StandardInput=tty RemainAfterExit=yes [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target 2: Install numlockx 3: put the following in /usr/local/bin/numlock: #!/bin/bash for tty in /dev/tty{1..6} do /usr/bin/setleds -D +num < "$tty"; done (adjust number of available ttys to match those configured) -- Evolution as taught in public schools is, like religion, based on faith, not based on science. Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata
