redirecting pesky error-messages

[Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ling.ucsc.edu>]

Hello. I have a wireless access point connected to my Debian (woody)
desktop machine at home. I have a laptop (running Debian sarge) which
has a wireless PCMCIA card. The desktop machine is set up as a very
simple router for the home network.

This all works well apart from one annoyance. Even though the wireless
connection (from the laptop to the WAP to the desktop to the net)
seems perfectly fine to me, as far as performance is concerned, I get
a lot of performance-related error messages on the laptop screen. If
I'm using X, of course, they don't show up (no console), but I'm not
always using X and don't want to have to use it all the time.

But often the messages come so thick and fast that it becomes very
difficult to use, say, emacs or vi.

I was thinking that I could probably get around this difficulty by
redirecting the console output to some dedicated virtual terminal. I
think I can do that by putting a line like:
  
   append="console=/dev/tty6"

in /etc/lilo.conf.

But how risky would this be? Or does anyone know of other possible
solutions to the problem?

Thanks very much,

Jim