Xorg + Ratpoison setup

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.

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