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I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04, and all ALT key functionality is gone in this Wine program I've been using for years.

The program is elderly, it came out back in 2005, but it's worked beautifully under Wine for years. There's no work-around for the lack of the ALT key, and the lack renders the program almost unusable.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the program itself and Wine, but that didn't make any difference.

Any ideas?

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  • I should mention the name and version of "this wine program" in the question. Have you tried the latest development version of wine? wine-1.5.27. You may need to report this problem as a regression in wine, if the program worked fine in earlier versions.
    – user76204
    Apr 2, 2013 at 18:40
  • Whoops, good point. It doesn't work in either 1.4 or 1.527. (I also tried Photoshop Elements 5, which used to work just fine, and the ALT key is broken there too.) I tried a different keyboard just in case, but no difference.
    – begtognen
    Apr 2, 2013 at 22:27
  • Please see my edit for a possible fix that is worth trying.
    – user76204
    Apr 2, 2013 at 22:55

1 Answer 1

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Firstly, I should try disabling alt + mouse click window movement in your window manager. That is noted in the useful wine FAQ as a possible fix:

Even in full screen mode, window managers typically capture some keys. For example, in KDE and GNOME, Alt+Left Click is used to move the whole application window by default. Thus, this key combination is not available to applications in Wine. You have to disable the colliding combinations in your window manager.

You may also want to try earlier versions of wine with playonlinux as well as the fix discussed above, if just the fix itself doesn't work.

Playonlinux allows you to select older wine versions, install your program in a fresh wineprefix, and then use the specified wine version to run your program. It doesn't matter what version of wine you have installed to the system.

Firstly, install the program with:

sudo apt-get install playonlinux

1) Start playonlinux and go to tools > manage wine versions and view the list of older versions that you can install. Select the version you want and click the arrow to the right and go through the installation procedure.

The available versions go right back to wine 0.9 and to the latest 1.5 release, and so there should be a version that will be useful for you and solves the problem.

enter image description here

2) Now, go to file > install > 'install a non listed program' and choose 'install a program in a new virtual drive'. Now, you can get to the screen below and select the version of wine that you want to use.

enter image description here

3) Finish the installation by going through the various screens and playonlinux will complete the process and should give you a launcher on the desktop. If not, the program will be available within the initial playonlinux menu screen.


For backing up your prefix and settings within playonlinux, please see my answer here:

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  • YES! That worked beautifully. What a relief, so wonderful to have my Wine programs back again. In Lubuntu, I edited lubuntu-rc.xml so that the lines beginning with "<mousebind button="A-Left"" now read <mousebind button="W-Left"". Thanks so much for your help.
    – begtognen
    Apr 3, 2013 at 21:51

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