Whoa. Very interesting news.

Edit /usr/bin/xephwm5 in your Debian chroot.

Go to the end. Find the line that has qobi-wmhint-fix on it. Uncomment it (remove the #) and change that line to read:

Comment out the line under it, the one that has /usr/bin/set-focus on it.

Open LXDE. Try to lose keyboard focus. See if you get the same results that I'm getting, which are: NO KEYBOARD FOCUS LOSS! You can switch to and from LXDE like any other app.

Wow! That works! Great...

Works well for me as well.

I have sent Easy Debian 0.9.51 to Extras-devel.

LXDE keyboard focus is now completely fixed. You can treat LXDE like any other Maemo window.

This version adds a Maemo-side script, /usr/bin/debian-lxde that does the same thing that xephwm5 was doing in the chroot, except it uses the new fixed way that never loses keyboard focus.

It now depends on wmctrl and zenity in Maemo, which adds some bulk to the installed size, but the results are worth it.

I have also caved to rebhana's pleading; the new script starts LXDE using debbie-sue. Switch this to debbie if you prefer the old behaviour.

I downloaded the new update and it is working great now..

I have first tried the Debian-side fix, seen that it worked, and then switched to 0.9.51. However, there I've encountered some occasional weird behavior:

When I first opened LXDE, to my surprise I had an English keyboard again, despite the "setkbd de" in /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart. Closing chroot and starting LXDE again, I then had a German keyboard, but some of my additional remappings of the keyboard were missing out (I do those further remappings with xmodmap launched from /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart). Doing it a third time, my keyboard was finally as it used to be. I've never had such unpredictabilities with my keyboard hacks before - albeit some things never worked.

On one of the launches of LXDE I even had missing keyboard focus from the very beginning! Though once started successfully, I don't lose it, neither when going to task manager nor through the power button.

And just now I had LXDE not starting at all after clicking the OK button. After the little window closed, I was left with the screen telling about Ctrl+Backspace, from which I could not even get out to the task manager without resorting to the camera trick.

Could it be that there is some race condition complicating the combination of Maemo-side and Debian-side scripts?

I'm testing it some more, but perhaps I should also go back and try out more extensively the Debian-side fix.

EDIT: After a reboot of the phone, I once again could not start LXDE. It's hanging at the "Ctrl+Back" screen. These are the processes that I see with top:
EDIT2: After finalling killing it, and doing a close chroot, Xorg is still running, with CPU at 600MHz, so I have to reboot to get rid of that.

rebhana: that is some very odd behaviour. XOrg is the Maemo X Server, it is Xephyr that is the culprit.

As for the race conditions, I try to avoid them by waiting in two loops in my script.

I also am noticing more "variability" in my LXDE startup, but not since 0.9.51, no, this is since PR 1.2. Often, I get an X instead of a cursor, and the icons seem to be alternating between two themes. Very strange!

It often seems to be the first startup that has the most problems. Maybe I'll open the chroot with a harmless command first, then proceed from there...?

I'm suspecting now that Xorg was behaving so strangely, because right after the boot the phone was busy with trackerd. So after my last reboot, I waited until all the activity has gone away, and then I can start LXDE just fine.

Perhaps I should try whether I can get any of this odd behavior with 0.9.50 and the Debian-side fix?

EDIT: I'm testing 0.9.50 with Debian-side fix now, and I'm not able to get any of the odd behavior so far. I'll keep you posted.

If I start the Maemo-side script with

the problems don't seem to happen... Can you confirm, rebhana?

Should that go into /usr/bin/debian-lxde or be run separately in a terminal?

EDIT: Actually, I think the one instance where LXDE did start, but without keyboard focus was with open chroot, and also in those cases where the keyboard behaved slightly differently. But I'll try again.