Re: Is Grub2 expected to turn off NUM? (solved: is not expected, and does not)

[Felix Miata]

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