On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 4:28 PM, Brandon Allbery
As for Xkb wizards, there are few such. Not even the xorg devs really understand it that well! See http://www.charvolant.org/~doug/xkb/html/index.html (although it seems to not be responding for me right now). It's a bit of a crawling horror, which nobody really understands (else they would have sorted out this mess, since they've known about it for something like ten years) and everyone is afraid to touch. That said, the basic solution is to use that web page as a guide, copy the Xkb keymap definition you're using and remove all the numlock-related parts. (Unfortunately, that may be easier said than done, given the mess that is Xkb.)
Yea, that URL seems somewhat dead at the moment. I did though manage to find this one: http://thomer.com/howtos/kxkb_xmodmap.html That does not seem overly complicated. Whether it can actually be used to completely disable the numlock key I'm not sure, but it is worth a shot. If I can't outright disable the numlock key, maybe I can map it to something else, like this Thomer guy have done with the caps key. All in all this truly is a mess. Disabling a key should be dead-simple. I'm guessing it is issues such as this one that the wayland/mir people are trying to solve? :o) Thomas Løcke