[Usability] Running gnome-terminal as a desktop background

[Hynek Hanke <hanke brailcom org>]

Hello all,

for me, the classical ``background'' of my Gnome desktop (some inactive
image + a few icons on top of it) is something quite old and not really
working well in how I use computers today. In their present form , I
don't use desktop icons at all. But I have no idea about better
solutions for an ordinary user.

However, what *I* would like to do, is to use the background as a
terminal. That would really very much improve the Gnome usability
for me (and maybe that's the case of other power users too, I don't
know). I keep launching gnome-terminal all the time for every silly
thing, that's annoying. And when I have it as a window, it gets in the
way while doing other things, so I shut it down again. Only to need
to launch it again in a while...

What I'd love to have (when I launch Gnome and no app is running) is:
the bottom Gnome pannel (with menus, applets and icons), the terminal
(maybe with a nice picture) as a background (no icons there), the bottom
Gnome pannel with a list of running applications.

I was thinking of doing this by a maximized gnome-terminal that will
automatically launch itself on startup. However, I have two issues:

1) I can't get rid of the metacity border (and especially the top box)
of the window.

2) gnome-terminal gets listed among the running applications on the
bottom Gnome pannel. I'd love to make it disappear from there.

3) I would love it to get focus on startup.

Please, do you have any ideas how can I solve these three issues?
I'm no experienced Gnome user, so excuse me if these questions are dumb.

I could easily launch apps from command line, I could use gnome in
the same powerful way as I use the console, no need to use mouse
or the not-so-easy-keyboard navigation when I don't want to... i would
love that :)

Thank you,
Hynek Hanke

PS: I'm very sorry for posting the last message without proper subject.