Tuesday, March 17, 2015

How to enable caps lock notification in Fedora?

Issue:
I don't have caps lock notification light in my keyboard. Is there anyway to enable on-screen caps lock notification in Fedora?

Solution - Using LXPanel
I switched my desktop to LXDE long back. So this solution will be applicable only for those who use LXDE desktop in Fedora. I hope this solution will also work in all LXDE desktop but I am not sure about it.

The caps lock notification that I am talking about belongs to LXPanel. To activate it follow below steps:
1. Right click on the task bar (where you see time, battery level etc) and click on Panel Settings.
2. In Panel Settings, open the third tab Panel Applets.
3. Click on Add button, scroll down to find Keyboard LED. Highlight it and click Add button.
4. You can place it anywhere on the task bar by using up and down option. By pressing up button your applet will move right and left when you press down button.
5. By default, Keyboard LED is will be on for Num Lock and Scroll Lock. You can enable caps lock by right click on the applet and open tick the notification you want.
A button is caps lock applet
6. When you press caps lock the applet will be black out the A letter and gets grey out when cap lock is off.

Since LXDE is light weight version it doesn't support on-screen caps lock notification. Since applet belong to LXDE, the same option will not be available in GNOME 3. This applet feature is bundled with LXDE and so my guess is it should be available in all Linux distros.

If you in other desktop like KDE, GNOME 3, XFCE etc you can install LXDE by issuing following command in terminal.

yum -y groupinstall lxde

You should log in as a root user to perform the installation. If you get any errors related to groupinstall, read this article to fix. It is normal to get errors while performing groupinstall. After installation, to switch to LXDE desktop from any other, you need to install desktop switcher application. There are several working desktop switching tool, you can use any of them.

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