I am quite new at this Linux thing, and this seems like a simple issue, but I can't figure it out and fail to find any record of the same issue elsewhere. Please forgive me if this has been answered; perhaps I'm just not finding it because I'm not describing it correctly. I have wine set to run programs in a "Wine desktop" window. If I start the program and never leave, it functions fine. If I ever switch windows, however, I can never get the focus back to the "wine desktop" window. If try to switch back (selecting the program from the taskbar, alt-tab, and clicking the window all have the same effect), I can use mouse input on the virtual desktop, but the keyboard input still goes to the previous window. I use Ubuntu (Karmic), which by default shows an opaque header bar for the active window, and translucent one for the inactive windows. Even when all other windows are closed, I can never get the Wine window to be "active" again. Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any assistance.
I made some changes in this area relatively recently, and they may have broken (or fixed, but more likely broken) this. What version of Wine are you using? What window manager? Does this happen with Wine's builtin notepad program?
Thanks for replying. Wine 1.1.31 in GNOME The problem does not occur with Wine's notepad. The question was interesting, so I did some experimenting. To test within the same virtual desktop window, I opened Steam. The problem did not occur when using the Steam client. When I start a any game, windowed or not, the problem occurs. When I use the mouse to close the game, the problem disappears with it. I'm thinking it's related to DirectX, then, perhaps?
Have you tried to upgrade your wine version to the latest (at the moment 1.1.34) and testing your applications again?
Victory! The new version is all it took to fix the problem! It turns out that in the end, Ubuntu's package manager somehow offered 1.1.31 in a package labeled 1.1.34. Strange. When I added the source from http://www.winehq.org/download/deb , I was able to update properly. Many thanks to all three of your for your help. After 19 years of Microsoft, I'm finally trying to reform. Thanks for helping me stumble my way through. Vincent - If it's still of any interest to you for some reason, "which -a wine" yields: usr/bin/wine