gEDA-user: PCB multiple footprint selection

I'm using PCB version 20050127 which is comes packaged with the stable version of Debian (Sarge). When I select a group of components on one side of the board using the mouse to draw a square with the select tool, components on the other side of the board also get selected. Thus, when I move the footprints to a different location, footprints on both solder side and component side move. This makes it more difficult to move footprints on one side that have strict placement requirements relative to each other. I can see where it would be useful to move components on both sides simultaneously, however, I really need to be able to move groups of footprints on only one side at a time as well. I can select multiple components by shift-middle button click which does work pretty well if there are not many components that need to be selected.

At first,I was expecting the selection to only take components on the active layer. Then I thought turning off the opposite layer would disable the component selection on the opposite side of the board but that didn't work either. I checked the release notes for newer versions of the software and didn't see that this issue had been covered but, I was still wondering if a newer version might have improved this behavior or if someone had a suggestion for working around it more effectively.

Thanks for listening.