NumLock issue with a USB keyboard on my Acer TravelMate laptop

Iltbreg · 10-18-2008, 01:46 PM

Hi everyone!

I am calling for your help to solve an annoying problem. I have an Acer TravelMate 6291 laptop for my job (provided by my workplace) and I must say that this is quite a hate story between me and that thing. It manages it's heat badly, it doesn't stand travelling (throws up dead pixels on the screen every time I do long distances with it; don't ask me why), the screen is too small, so is the keyboard, etc... I am running Fedora 9 on it, which works perfectly (the only good thing), in dual boot with Windows XP, which came with the machine but I rarely use it. Now that I've introduces myself, I'll get to the point.

I found a USB keyboard (I don't know the model) that was lying around and thought that it would be more comfortable to work with that. It works very well except for the numbers on the right. Even when I activate NumLock, I can't type numbers with those touches as all they do is keep controlling the pointer. I installed numlockx with yum but it changed nothing. I didn't have that problem when I tried it on XP. So what is it that I can do? Any ideas?

Thank you for your time.

ciotog · 10-26-2008, 08:13 PM

I would run "xev | grep keycode" in a terminal, and check the results when pressing the problem keys. When numlock is turned off, the '1' key should give "keycode 87 (keysym 0xff9c, KP_End)". When pressing numlock, you should get "keycode 77 (keysym 0xff7f, Num_Lock)", and state should go from "0x0" to "0x10". With numlock turned on, '1' should give "keycode 87 (keysym 0xffb1, KP_1)".

If you don't get the proper output with the numlock key, it might help to add the following line to ~/.Xmodmap :

Code:

keycode 77 = Num_Lock

Iltbreg · 10-31-2008, 03:27 PM

Hi ciotog and thank you for your reply.

I did the xev test and the output I get is the correct one. You can see below what I get when I type 1 -> Num_Lock(turn on) -> 1.

Code:

state 0x0, keycode 87 (keysym 0xff9c, KP_End), same_screen YES,
    state 0x0, keycode 77 (keysym 0xff7f, Num_Lock), same_screen YES,
    state 0x10, keycode 77 (keysym 0xff7f, Num_Lock), same_screen YES,
    state 0x10, keycode 87 (keysym 0xffb1, KP_1), same_screen YES,

I still added the line you suggested in Xmodmap but nothing changed. I'm still unable to type numbers with those keys, they keep controlling the pointer.

Iltbreg · 12-01-2008, 12:17 PM

Hi!

Sorry to bring back a dead thread, but I just want to say that after replacing fedora 9 for F10, the problem disappeared somehow. So this case is solved.

However, could somebody please tell me where I can find the file(s) that deal with keyboard identification/configuration? I would like to make a backup off it(them) in case some changes happen during future updates; we never know.

Thanks