haha nanny boo boo, lucky me ended up with a debian 8.4 fresh install and whichever the first ~bob included pd version that loads the knob, have no clue if it's getting the canvas as a pixel abstraction thingy majiggy, the knob that sometimes resides in pd-externals folder which is missing from current machine and it makes my sounds as scratchy as the mouse moves on ridiculously fast machines that should be able to rx 100 mice and output 64 ch of 96kHz sample rate audio without scratching but nope. anyways i think its a mouse / tk thing because there are some slower computers that have glitchety scratchety not nary a hindrance. so...... somewhere floating around is a knob abstraction, it possibly could be loaded from pd-externals ,
also re: unfocused keyboard routing, if on linux try xinput.
oh well must hurry and find a solution , the awful thing is that i was so excited to try live puredata live in a little while with this fresh alpha6 stretch