aterm or gnome-terminal window unresponsive to keyboard events

Question

I try to investigate a problem: Depending on the way I launch aterm or gnome-terminal, the window may or may not be responsive to keyboard events.

The cause of the problem may reside in Aterm, Fluxbox, or Ubuntu 14.04: I'm searching a general linux way to investigate my problem.

In my fluxbox keys file I have a line:

Mod4 C :Exec aterm

This creates a keyboard short-cut for the combination SuperC that launches aterm.

Problem: the aterm windows that is created is (19 times out of 20) unresponsive to keyboard events: I cannot use the command line, no character is input, and also I cannot get contextual menu for the window with AltSpace whereas I can with right click button. As if no XWindow keyboard message could reach this window.

Same problem if I launch aterm from a guake terminal.

But I never have the problem if I launch aterm from an xterm window.

What is strange:

• There's no problem with xterm. If I launch xterm by the keyboard shortcut or by guake: the xterm windows is naturally receiving keyboard events and works just like expected.
• aterm was working perfectly with the system Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 12.10 and Ubuntu 13.10
• the aterm version and the fluxbox version is the same between Ubuntu 13.10 and 14.04 (where I have the problem): aterm 1.00.01 and fluxbox 1.3.5

I have no idea how to investigate the problem, where to start ?

• what verbose logs should I check ?
• what app could I use to give me an hint on what goes wrong ?
• how to find if it is an xwindow, fluxbox, aterm, or ubuntu bug/problem ?

(As a side note, I want/would like to keep using aterm, because of its native support for transparency)

Answer 1

I solved the problem :

• creating a excutable script ~/default_terminal.sh which code is calling gnome-terminal for example
• calling this script inside my .fluxbox/keys and .fluxbox/menu configuration file.

Don't what was wrong in the end. It's ok with this trick.