One of the typical things of a laptop keyboard is that it's too small to also contain a numerical pad area on the utter right of the keyboard (Except for some 17inch laptops). To cope with this loss, most manufacturers project the numerical keypad on some other keys. By having some kind of "modifier" key, there can be switched between normal alphabetical character or the values and symbols of the numerical pad.
Unfortunately, something is wrong with either Ubuntu, Gnome or the Asus C90s: once in a while it enables the numerical pad. It could also be that I myself press sometimes a secret keyboard combination that I did not discover yet. Nevertheless, it causes me to have the numerical pad enabled against my will. Although uglier things happen with people against their will, it would not be as bad if you knew how the reset the keyboard. And as I'm not a bookkeeper and never will enable this feature-for-some for myself, I have no way to disable it.
It happened to me some time before also and after a while I remembered that I found out that the problem only occurred during gnome, and the gnome session of my own user in particular. So knowing this, it was pretty easy to solve it: remove all your .gnome-related directories in your home directory.
As I did not want to reconfigure my gnome desktop again, I decided to do some research to see where the wrong setting came from. Well, it was:
.gconf/desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard
This entry contained a host-(hostname) entry and that contained directory called '0' (zero). Here a %gconf file was standing that contained the following line:
<gconf>
<entry name="numlock_on" mtime="1218998942" type="bool" value="true">
</entry>
</gconf>
Removing the keyboard directory altogether (as I did not have any special keyboard things installed) solved my problem. Or will there be an easier way to solve this?
.gconf/desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard
This entry contained a host-(hostname) entry and that contained directory called '0' (zero). Here a %gconf file was standing that contained the following line:
<gconf>
<entry name="numlock_on" mtime="1218998942" type="bool" value="true">
</entry>
</gconf>
Removing the keyboard directory altogether (as I did not have any special keyboard things installed) solved my problem. Or will there be an easier way to solve this?
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