Minimizing full screen games (like alt-tab in Windows)

striderstrahan · 11-24-2004, 07:04 AM

Hi,

I put this before on the software forum but noone answered. I think it's more of a games issue anyway so I'm reposting here!

One of my favourite features of Windows that I've missed a bit when transferring totally to Linux was how you could alt-tab out of games and full-screen programs. Since the full screen programs take all of the keyboard input it alt-tab doesn't work! And when I say get a message while playing a game I can't quickly minimize it and bring the game back up. Even for programs that doesn't stress the computer at all such as Battle for Wesnoth. I'd really like it to work on UT2004 which is the game I play most!

Is there some way of minimizing programs like this or making alt-tab so it works even in full-screen programs?

Incidentely I use (mostly) KDE on Debian Sarge Linux.

Thanks

madluther · 11-24-2004, 10:55 PM

It's possible to switch to windowed mode while running UT2k4, just press Alt-Enter to toggle back and forth between fullscreen and windowed. The only problem with this is the mouse remains grabbed by the UT2k4 window. To work around that you can add

Code:

Option "AllowDeactivateGrabs" "true"

to the ServerFlags section of your xorg.conf or XF86Config file.
If you dont have a ServerFlags section in your conf file it should look like this

Code:

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option "AllowDeactivateGrabs" "true"
EndSection

Once X has been restarted you can use Ctrl-Alt-numpad_divide key to ungrab the mouse

HTH

Mad