multiple gnome-panels

[Neil Doane <neil tungstengraphics com>]

I'm trying to set up a system running with a frontend machine and some
machines running a DMX wall.  I want users of the system to be able to sit
down at GDM on the frontend, log in once, do whatever they want to do on the
frontend, then when they want to use the DMX wall, run a small script that
will start up Xdmx on the wall, start a window manager, then x2x so they can
just slide their cursor over and start using the wall, etc.  I've got it
all working except that I can't seem to get a gnome-panel running on this
second X server and get an error dialog that gnome-panel has detected an
already-running instance of itself and will now exit, which it then
does...at least most of the time (sometimes, oddly, it will come up, but
then show some nasty dialog errors when it exits...I've tried starting it
with --sm-disable and such, but it doesn't seem to matter to gnome-panel and
I suspect I'm fundamentally misunderstanding how it's supposed to be used.
:)

(As a secondary problem, when I -do- manage to get gnome-panel to
occasionally come up, it starts with what may be the smallest font I've ever
seen, way smaller than the font the already-running gnome-panel is using 
...any ideas on that one?)

Is there a way to get a gnome-panel running on this second X server while
it's running on the 1st?  Right now, I'm just executing a script that
basically manually starts Xdmx, then starts metacity, then sets a background
with xbgset, then tries to run gnome-panel (but fails).  Is there a better
way of doing this?  (I don't want the user to have to 'log in' to the DMX
wall, just use it like an application.  Run something and it comes up, exit
and it goes down.  So like using gdmflexiserer to start a new gdm login is
not really what I'm after.  If there's a way to use gdmflexiserver to just
start a new X server -without- going through GDM, I'd be interested in that
too.

Any ideas/help?  Is this the right place to ask this?



Neil