X11 should allow Shift-Numlock to turn on keypad mouse emulation

[Declan Malone]

In some other distros this is enabled by default.
The major use for it on the Raspberry Pi is to allow you to free up a USB slot for something like a wireless or bluetooth dongle, assuming you need the other one for a keyboard. The Pi also often reboots when some USB devices are attached (eg, wireless dongle) so you can't hotswap the device in exchange for the mouse (once you've used it to actually start the program you need).
Also, when starting up X11, you really need a mouse attached to even set up keyboard shortcuts like ctl-alt-t to start up a terminal.
I'm not sure if this qualifies as a bug as such (maybe it's just disabled somewhere), but this would be a very useful feature to have enabled by default given the hardware shortcomings of the Pi that I mentioned above.

[hamish (hamish-b)]

Try adding this to ~/.xinitrc:
 $ setxkbmap -option keypad:pointerkeys

see also https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=904880

and 1.4 million+ other google hits (not kidding) for posts and comments by X users confused and annoyed by this incredibly handy feature being turned off by default now. ^%#$^@&!

fortunately the raspi-config setup program made it easy to reenable Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to quit X.
(&/or add this to ~/.xinitrc: setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp)

regards,
Hamish

[Diederik (didi-debian)]

Is this still an issue? Did the solution by hamish fix your issue?

The problem you see with 'hotswapping' usb devices is likely because you're using a Pi 1B and not a Pi 1B+ or Pi 2B, which have better power management.

Furthermore this sounds like an issue with image provided by raspberrypi.org and as such you should report them at https://github.com/RPi-Distro/repo/issues if it's still an issue.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Raspbian because there has been no activity for 60 days.]