Changing num lock state on boot, VMWare Player

For school we have to work with different virtual machines in VMWare Player for some courses. There's CentOS6, there's Ubuntu, there's Windows 7.

The passwords on these machines contain numbers and it's very annoying to have to turn num lock on every time the VM boots to type in the password since I often forget it.

The second problem is to have it remain on after logging in and logging out of user accounts. On Windows 7 I know the registry entry for that, I don't know how to do it in the Linux distributions however.

I've searched the net but most solutions that I found are for VMWare Fusion or something else not equal to VMWare Player.

I would like a detailed answer to this or at least something to help me out already, and I believe other people will also be glad to see this answered.

This can be easily done by adding either the line

bios.forceSetupOnce = "TRUE"

or

bios.bootDelay = "xxxx" (milliseconds, 5000 works fine)

to the .vmx file in a text editor of choice. This will either force the VM to go into setup on boot once (the line is removed after that) or create a delay long enough for you to press the setup key to enter the BIOS (you may not want this every time). The BIOS has a menu for keyboard options that includes the setting for num lock state on boot.

Source of this information is a VMware KB article: Accessing the BIOS when the POST screen clears too quickly.