Start X Painlessly

Perhaps I should start this post in V. S. Naipaul style with a dedication 'To Sajith for asking me why' ;). Watching over my shoulder while I was working on my laptop, he asking me why I used this particular command to start the X Window server.

$ openvt startx

As command line junkie I work on linux console most of the time, only starting graphical X server with startx command when needed. The problem with using startx command is that it locks up the terminal by printing numerous warnings and messages while the X server starts and thus making the terminal unusable. Also I limit the number of virtual terminal on my computer to just two instead of standard six on gnu/Linux operation system.

So, the openvt command provided by the console-tools package helps me spawn a new virtual terminal and that's where all the warning and messages are printed leaving me to continue working in peace. Another added advantage to this is that I can do startx from a Emacs shell instance too, this is neat!.