xterm in separate consoles 3873
You can run an xterm without a window manager, but when you call an X app from it, you won't be able to access the xterm while it is running...no commandline. The X app (say a graphical browser) will own the xterm.
An xterm is a subsbreastute for a console. It's a pty (psuedo-terminal) and a console is a tty (terminal). X runs out of a tty, but xterms, etc., run out of a pty. These are created where a tty would ordinarily be. I run startx on tty1 but this 'xterm' shows up on 'tty' 3, which doesn't even have a getty running on it.
A pty multi-plexer is called a 'window manager', and I think that your solution is to do what I am doing here, which is to run an 'xterm' (I use aterm, which is much smaller than xterm) in a minimal window manager, flwm here. That way you can have as many 'xterms' as you want on the same tty.
It depends on how X is started. If you're using xinit, then it starts X, reads shell commands from .xinitrc and executes them. xinit kills X when it hits EOF in .xinitrc. My .xinitrc looks...
Or you'd have to login to each tty seperately and attach to the X session-server on the other ttys. I think that requires a seperate instance of X on each tty (console). Not efficient.
Startx reads ~-.Xsession. See man Xsession. That's where you do things like you want to do here (if they are possible :-).
I run a textmode window manager, screen, in a single xterm, with which I can create as many console pty's as I want, only using the X window manager for graphical, X, apps.
HTH,
AC