Salix Forums

I have used slackware for a long time but it is overkill for my little aspire one 751 netbook. I installed salix-13.1 on my desktop using vbox and am quite impressed so I tried to install it on my netbook tonight but have run into a problem.

Note that the current kernel version modules will not work with my broadcom wireless chipset so I have to start the install using noudev. This was not a problem installing slack on this netbook I just had to go in and blacklist the relevant modules before booting post install.

My Salix install from a usb stick via unetbootin and using noudev runs fine and accepts input from my keyboard until I get to providing a root password and adding users at which time I can not input characters correctly. For example when typing in the username "rick" I get "r5c2" on the screen.

Thinking this might be a one off I quit the setup to the command line but it is no different, rick displays as r5c2. When I type "root" I get "r66t".

I did manage to edit my /etc/modprobe.d /blacklist so I could boot into Salix but once I arrived at the logon prompt I still had the problem with incorrect keyboard input.

I had time tonight so I did the install again and get the same thing after nominating the US keyboard at the beginning of the install and australian english at the end of the install. These were the same selections made when I installed in vbox on my slack workstation and they worked there. The slack install also worked on the netbook.

Any suggestions would be most appreciated

Did you try to use the "Fn" key to unset a toggled numpad on your netbook's keyboard?

You have numlock turned on.

If I go in with something like slax., what would I edit to turn of numlock?

It never ocured to me that I didn't need to turn it on having only used desktops before.

Never mind and thanks, I looked on the vbox install and I see there's an rc.numock. Too easy.

During install there must have been a stage where it was asked if numlock should be off or on.

You can now turn it off with keyboardsetup either in CLI or from the system menu.

Edit: or with rc.numlock

There was a question at the end of the installation, asking you if you want to have numlock turned on or off. You probably answered on there, but you should never do that in laptops, where numlock is not only mostly useless, it's confusing to have it on too.

I just changed the rc.numlock permission to 660 with slax and booted salix as linux single. I should have expected the root password to be stuffed as numlock was on when I set it at install. Who knows what it might be now, lol!

Easy. Just change the corresponding letters to their numlock equivalents.
j=1
k=2
l=3
u=4
i=5
o=6
7, 8 and 9 are the same.

Or boot into slax again, chroot to the salix partition and run passwd to change it to whatever you want.

I've got it sorted out with slax and chroot. Now I can really get myself into trouble :^) Thanks to all for the suggestions!