== Getting console messages in X

As a system administrator, I like to see console messages even when
I'm in X (which is almost all of the time). On my systems, console
messages come from high priority kernel messages, high priority notes
from syslog, and sometimes messages from init, and I like to know
about all of these.

In theory, xterm's _-C_ command line switch should do this
nicely, and indeed it did for years. These days, there are
two unfortunate problems with it:

* back in 2001 or so, the xterm people decided that _-C_ should
  quietly ignore your request if you didn't own _/dev/console_.
* around about the 2.6.9 or 2.6.10 kernel, the Linux kernel people
  decided that you couldn't redirect console messages unless you were
  root.

I strongly disagree with xterm's paranoia, since it's pointless if
xterm is unprivileged (which it almost always is, and the code could
always just check). If xterm has no special privileges, the user can
just write their own program to do the appropriate _TIOCCONS_
operation; all blocking _-C_ from working does is inconvenience
people.

So back in 2001 I grumbled and wrote my own ten line program to do the
needed _TIOCCONS_ ioctl, and there things sat until recently.

Getting around the 'only root can use _TIOCCONS_' problem is a little
bit more work. Since I'm the only user of my machine, I just made my
_getconsole_ program from 2001 setuid root and group-executable only
by me. A more general solution would be a program that checks the
ownership or permissions of _/dev/console_ and only does the
_TIOCCONS_ if the person running it has appropriate access.

It's possible that _xconsole_ in recent distributions already does
this, but I personally suspect not. Certainly the Fedora Core 4
version shows no likely signs of this.