no keyboard in openarena

[DawgG]

the keyboard in openarena does not work (the mouse does, though) in all other ganes that i have tested, the keyboard does work.
whe i start the game from a terminal, i see all the keys that were pressed when the game is shut down.
it's an ~amd64-system with the latest software and xorg uses nouveau. there is nothing conspicuous in Xorg.log.
please help me solve this strange problem.
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DUMM KLICKT GUT.