1995-era installshield woes - foreground window never appears

[Francois Gouget]

On Sun, 19 Jan 2003, Dan Kegel wrote:
[...]
> > ...  "managed" mode might help with this problem as well.
>
> Aha!  .wine/config had managed=Y.  Switching it to managed=N
> made the dialog box show up properly!
>
> OK, this has to be a bug in wine, doesn't it?

Not really. I believe this is a typical case of 'unmanaged windows go on
top'. Let me explain.

That big blue window is most probably handled by Wine as an unmanaged X
window because it should not have the regular window decorations or
something like that. The problem is that some window managers (e.g. the
KDE WM) systematically put such windows on top of regular managed
windows. So when Wine then creates the installer dialog, a regular
managed X window, it is hidden by that big blue window. Furthermore
these window managers often make it hard to bring the managed windows on
top.

So the 'fix' is to get Wine to treat all windows as managed windows...
and tell the window manager not to give them decorations. This has been
discussed before and I believe it is in Alexandre's todo-list. But this
stuff is pretty complex so it may take some time...

So in the meantime the solution is to either use Managed=N or
Desktop="800x600".  Desktop="800x600" is pretty nice for installers,
especially if you put it in an executable-specific section, typically
one with the name of the installer. But desktop mode does not work very
well either (new processes get out of the desktop). Oh, well...


-- 
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
The nice thing about meditation is that it makes doing nothing quite respectable
                                  -- Paul Dean