Numlock turns off at login and misses first keystroke

[Gary W.]

As the computer goes through its startup process numlock becomes activated and it then brings me into the login screen. The first key I press, no matter what key it is on the keyboard, does not register as a pressed key at all, but instead the numlock light on the keyboard will go off. After that I can press any key and it sees my keystrokes just fine.

I'm not sure where to attribute this bug, as I've no longer got a vanilla configuration, with Gnome, kde, and xfce all installed, and formerly using gdm instead of kdm. I don't remember if I observed this bug within gdm as well, but I may have. I've had the issue ever since I started using the ubuntu feisty beta, but am now using Gutsy with KDE and kdm and still see the problem. This bug is only noticeable if I'm rebooting or I've done a complete shutdown and am booting back up. I've used 2 different keyboards and still I have this happen, one of them a logitech office comfort and the other a logitech elite keyboard LE.

[otzenpunk (reisswolf-nospam)]

Although I can't reproduce this myself, but there are several users in the German community forum who have the same problem:

http://forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/94206/ (Language: German)
http://forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/99484/ (Language: German)

Some of them use gdm and others kdm.

[tobiwae (tobiwae-deactivatedaccount)]

I can confirm this bug. I have the same problem on my machine using Kubuntu Feisty (kdm).

[Riot777 (riot777)]

I can confirm this bug also it's the same as my earlier bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/115787

[didgethesky (didgethesky)]

I can confirm this bug. It's there since I switched from edgy to feisty (kubuntu) and after some debugging I came to the following conclusions:

- The cause for this behavior is that the PS/2 keyboard is not recognized as a new device by the kernel until the user presses a key.
If you press this first key when entering your user/password, dmesg shows the new keyboard device as its very last entry:
[ 80.944130] input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard as /class/input/input5
If you press the first key in an earlier stage of the boot process, before X is started, the LED will switch to off at that point (if activated before by BIOS) and dmesg shows that the keyboard has been detected at that moment.
This first key does not act as a NUM-key replacement but simply forces the kernel to see the keyboard. the kernel then immediately sets the numlock LED to the kernels internal numlock state, which is OFF. Then kdm sets the numlock LED to the value specified in /etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc, if configured.

- The bug vanishes when acpi=off is added to the kernel parameters.
In this case the keyboard device is detected at the beginning of the boot process:
[ 20.970702] input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard as /class/input/input1
shortly after this line
[ 20.903071] serio: i8042 KBD port at 0x60,0x64 irq 1
(For me, this only works on reboots but not on cold starts.)

- Therefore it seems this bug is not XServer, kdm, gdm, kde, gnome, ... related.

[Luke Faraone (lfaraone)]

Hi,

I'm unable to reproduce this in Jaunty. Can you try it then and see if it is still occuring?

[Riot777 (riot777)]

This is not occuring in Karmic. I think this bug has been fixed since Feisty.

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

This bug report was marked as Incomplete and has not had any updated comments for quite some time. As a result this bug is being closed. Please reopen if this is still an issue in the current Ubuntu release http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download . Also, please be sure to provide any requested information that may have been missing. To reopen the bug, click on the current status under the Status column and change the status back to "New". Thanks.

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