[Wine]Mouse focus in Wine

[Mark Knecht]

Hi,
   If I play a game in Wine - either Caesar III or Half Life come to
mind right now - they seem to work better for me in a windowed setup
where the game is not full screen and I can still see the rest of my
Gnome desktop in the background. Caesar III plays well under Cedega or
Wine, HL much better under Cedega, but the point being that I've tried
both.

   The frustration I've had is that with either environment, when the
Wine game window is not in focus - say a terminal is up front and the
Wine window banner shows it's not active - the games are still
following the mouse. This causes numerous problems. For instance
you're sitting in a safe place in Half Life. You pop a terminal up
using Alt-Tab and start typing. Maybe you decide to use the mouse to
open another app so you go to the bottom left corner of Gnome's
desktop. Suddenly Half Life, sitting in the background, moves your
position like it would if it was the app in focus, you're no longer in
a safe place and you die. Bummer... ;-)

   I haven't found a way to get a game being played under Wine to act
like a normal app. I've played a bit with the managed configuration,
as well as the dxgrag item. DxGrab seems to keep the mouse inside the
game and disables Alt-Tabbing so I cannot get out to do anything else.

   Certainly I can save the game, pop to some other window in the game
where I'm not playing, like the HL Load screen, and I have no
problems, but how can I get Wine to not watch the mouse if the Wine
app is not active?

   Distro is Gentoo, many versions of Wine, Cedega's most recent.

Thanks in advance,
Mark