On 01-Sep-10 12:41:55, Tim Green wrote:
On 1 September 2010 13:27, Ted Harding Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk wrote:
On 01-Sep-10 11:19:34, nev young wrote:
I have noticed that this is also becoming more common with linux (unbutu 10.04) and was wondering if this behaviour is a part of the programs themselves or if there is a system wide setting that will stop it.
That is, I want to be able to specify that the foreground task I am using does not lose focus unless I tell it to.
Anybody out there have more in depth knowledge of this sort of thing? Nev
This is prossibly more a matter of your desktop/window manager settings than it is due to programs "jumping the queue".
Ubuntu's Update Manager does the pop-to-front thing as it switches from downloading the updates to installing the updates. It is definitely not stray mouse or keyboard activity causing it because I had a maximised window in front, and the update over the weekend wasn't the first time I'd noticed. Very annoying!
Tim.
As I indicated, I think it is default (and possibly unalterable) behaviour that whenever a program opens a new window, that new window has the focus whatever else was happening when it opened. Therefore, if update manager opens a new window after several seconds doing something else, that will have focus and be "on top" even if you had something else on top of the original update manager window. See also[*] below.
As an example of what I mean, enter the following command in an already-open Xterm window:
(sleep 20 ; xterm) &
The original Xterm (or any other window which you switch to meanwhile) will stay "on top" and have focus, then after 20 seconds the new Xterm will pop up and have focus, also overlaying anything it is placed on top of if there was not enough free space for it in the desktop.
As I said, I don't know how (or whether it is possible) to over-ride this.
[*] I have just checked what happens with update manager. As it moves through its succesive stages, at the end of each stage it closes the additional dialogue window and then opens a new one for the next stage. So, if you have started something new in a window which overlays the update manager, each new dialogue window will come up on top of your working window and claim focus.
However, if you start update manager in one desktop, and then switch to another desktop to work in a window there, the successive windows opened by update manager will not appear in your second desktop but in the same desktop that has update manager.
So one solution for this case is to run update manager in a desktop of its own, and do whatever you want in other desktops. There should then be no interference. This of course would require you to switch back from time to time to the update manager desktop, to check progress and to make any required choices/responses.
Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 01-Sep-10 Time: 14:49:24 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------