[RP] Xorg + Ratpoison setup

[Robert Bradbury]

New user question.

I've got ratpoison installed on my Gentoo Linux system and I wanted to run it on a different terminal from my normal Xorg + Gnome terminals.  Is there any documentation (examples) on how to set this up?

What I'd like to do set things up so I have a standard environment on say vt8-vt10, ratpoison on vt11 and blackpox|openbox on vt12.  (And so forth for vt13, vt14, etc. if I can figure out how to enable switching to them).  From what I gather since everything seems to be under xdm is that this would require modifications to /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers to associate a server program other than /usr/bin/X with different VT's.

Alternatively, since what I'd like to do is get a multiple terminal situation in a single large window (something like a 2x2 or a 2x3 instead of the normal 1x2 situation with splitvt) can this be done under Xorg/Gnome in some other way?  (E.g. some fancy splitvt without running ratpoison?)

The problem I am wrestling with is that normal user window operations (Firefox under Gnome (really X)) tend to become unusable when running lengthy system builds (even "niced" system builds) but that during the same builds normal terminal operations (e.g. top and vmstat under splitvt) do not suffer from the same poor response times).  So Plan B would be a N-terminal splitvt type of arrangement in specific Gnome workspaces while Plan C would be switching VT's (more expensive and failure prone (i.e. I've crashed Xorg a fair amount due to driver evolution over the last couple of years) to different window manager systems as it seems the graphics card hardware+software situation under Linux is starting to become both stable and efficient [1].

Or is there something even more clever/stranger that I can do (e.g. ratpoison under in a virtual machine) [2]?

Thanks,

Robert Bradbury

1. I'd ultimately like to get to running 3 monitors off of a motherboard i915 + a PCIe Radeon 3450 (R620)) withf a Pentium IV Prescott which has more than enough CPU power for most development operations if it is managed reasonably well.

2. I eventually want to move to Xen but realize that I may be at the edge of what can be supported using the existing CPU at my disposal.