I have noticed this before on RedHat that when a user logs in the /dev/console it is still left as owner root and group root. This stops the logged in user from opening console with xconsole. On other distributions upon login the /dev/console is chown'd to the user thus allowing access. As a quick fix /dev/console can be chown'd by root to one user, then xconsole can be opened OK, I'm still checking to see if works OK - certainly anything pipped to /dev/console comes out ok. Another point is that XConsole opens OK, but doesn't show anything pipped to /dev/console. Ian
When Red Hat is configured to run XDM as the login manager, there is a script in /etc/X11/xdm called GiveConsole that does this for you. Otherwise it will need to be done manually when just using startx.