P.S. Han's suggestion fixed the problem with the fullscreen window popping
up behind other windows, but I still can't get the window to get focus, so
all my key presses are ignored.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to just override metacity's new
(mis)behavior. The whole idea behind the change was to prevent new windows
from "rudely" stealing the focus from the terminal, and it looks like the
committer completely overlooked the possibility that in some (I'd say most)
cases the user *wants* his graphical application to take the focus from the
terminal whence it was launched.
At any rate, the problem is 100% metacity's fault and not xmame's--any other
application that wants to claim the full screen (e.g. all manner of games,
video players and emulators) is screwed in the same way when run from a
terminal. The brokenness of the new behavior has been noticed and
vociferously complained about by quite a few people, and various patches to
make it optional have been submitted to GNOME Bugzilla. Until a patch is
committed and makes it into the various distros' update repositories, GNOME
2.14 users have several options:
1) Launch xmame from the command line panel applet--fortunately, metacity
does not consider this to be a "terminal".
2) Launch xmame in windowed mode and then switch to fullscreen via hotkey
3) Patch metacity themselves--it looks like all you have to do for a quick
and dirty fix is rip out the (small) block of code in window.c that begins
with this comment:
/* Terminal usage is different; users typically intend to launch
* many apps in quick succession or to just view things in the new
* window while still interacting with the terminal. Therefore,
* apps launched from the terminal should not take focus.
4) Use another GNOME-compliant window manager.
Incidentally, this is far from the first stunningly boneheaded regression in
usability GNOME has committed in the last little while, and odds are it'll
be far from the last. At least this one seems likely to get reverted.
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