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