Each time I upgrade Ubuntu, something small seems to stop working. Nothing too major – thankfully my trusty old Dell laptop seems to be quite Ubuntu-friendly.

The upgrade to Unity seemed to stop my NumLock from working at the login screen. After I logged in to Ubuntu, NumLock would illuminate, but at the login screen it remained off. It doesn’t take much to confound my less-than-stellar muscle memory, so since I always use the number pad to input the numbers in my password, logging in was frustrating.

Anyway, the good news is – if you have the same strange affliction – it’s not too difficult to fix.

As always, open a terminal window.

Type:

sudo apt-get install numlockx

When this has finished, type:

gksu gedit /etc/gdm/Init/Default

At the end of the file, just before the line that says exit 0, insert the following lines:

if [ -x /usr/bin/numlockx ]; then

exec /usr/bin/numlockx on

fi

Now exit from the terminal, and reboot your computer. NumLock should now be enabled at the login screen.