Recently I upgraded a piece of software on my system called Synergy.
This software allows one keyboard and mouse to control input on two or
more machines via a network connection -- not dissimilar to VNC, except
that only the keyboard and mouse input is forwarded, nothing with
video, et cetera, and that it lets you mouse back and forth as if you
were using a dualhead configuration on one box.
Anyhow, the problem is as follows: when using Synergy, I'm no longer
able to use text input in wine at all. This applies to both winehq and
crossover, winex appears to be unaffected. Originally, I thought this
was a problem with Synergy itself, but upon asking the developer about
it, I received notification that it was an X11 bug that wine wasn't
working around. The technical details are as follows:
"the X11 bug is subtle: if client A creates two windows X and Y where Y
is a child of X and selects for key events on window X, it expects to
receive key events that occur in either X or Y (the events in Y
propagate up to the nearest ancestor that has selected for the event).
if another client B (synergy) comes along and selects for key events in
Y then not only will B receive key events from Y (as expected) but key
events in A will no longer propagate from Y to X and A won't see the
events. that is, when B selects for events on window Y it changes the
behavior of client A. this is just wrong."
One of the guys in #winehq on freenode (TD) said to send this to
wine-devel, so here it is. I'm not sure if any more information is
required. The site for Synergy is http://synergy2.sourceforge.net.
Any 1.1.x release should demonstrate the problem for you. I'm hopeful
that this will be an easy problem to work around as winex is working
around it, but I'm not sure how similar or dissimilar the trees are in
this area.