This Space for Rent

Annoying Open Source®™© featureette of the day

The program Qemu, which I run in X11 on a R*dh*t server (RHEL3) at work, has the annoying feature that if I accidentally click the mouse inside the emulator window, it grabs the mouse and won't let go until I press a magic ctrl-alt keystroke to let it go. No, strike that, it's not the mouse grab that bugs me, it's that after I do ctrl-alt, it not only gives up the mouse but it manages to hang the virtual keyboard inside the emulator so I can't interact with the virtual machine (and the Linux installation I'm running inside that machine) anymore, but instead have to crash the emulator and start it up from scratch.

When you're in the middle of a two-cd install routine that includes a kernel recompile (which is slooooow; it takes about 4 hours for Qemu to do a kernel recompile on a 2.2ghz Intel P4), it's kind of annoying. It gets even more annoying the third or fourth time in a row.

Sure, it's open source®™© so I could go in and fix it. And then if I was very good I could get it to recompile. Maybe.