I can't believe I did all that looking anmd found the answer on my own hard drive in 
my personal "knowledge base":

"From: Wolfgang Bornath <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: How to set Numlock Off at logon
Date: Monday, April 12, 1999 11:05 PM

"Dave C." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> That's funny.  I'd like to know how to turn it ON as default, whether
> KDE is running or not.  -Dave
> 

As I posted to Val:
To turn ON numlock at boottime you may use the setleds
command. To make it permanent you may put it in a startup
file. Mandrake does so by default. In /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit you
may write:

INITTY=/dev/tty[1-8]
for tty in $INITTY; do
        setleds -D +num < $tty
        done

Now you have numlock in textmode on tty 1-8.

In KDE it's a totally different story. I haven't found a solution 
to do this with a simple command yet. My solution is to map the
keys of the num-pad to the single digits they shall provide.
I do this in ~/.Xmodmap, the file for keymapping for the user.

Looks like:
----------------------------------------
! redefines numeric keypad to be used without NumLock
keycode 79 = 7
keycode 80 = 8
keycode 81 = 9

keycode 83 = 4
keycode 84 = 5
keycode 85 = 6

keycode 87 = 1
keycode 88 = 2
keycode 89 = 3

keycode 90 = 0
keycode 91 = comma
keycode 86 = plus

! deactivates NumLock key
keycode 77 =  
-----------------------------------------

Now I've numlock ON when typing on a tty and numlock OFF but the
mapped keys when typing in KDE (or any other wm you may choose).

Works for me so I never really cared for a more simple solution.

Wolfgang"

So I did overlook the answer in the info I gathered before.

Perhaps the question is Why doesn't Mandrake do this for us since they do so much else 
that makes the distribution  special?

Hoyt

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