Disable screen blanking on VT switch

[Connor Behan]

I have two video cards each hooked up to a different monitor. The AGP 
card driving my laptop screen is the boot display device which shows the 
console and I've configred xorg to use the PCI card driving my external 
monitor when I start it. I can use Ctrl+Alt+Fn to switch between X on 
the big screen and a ttyn on the small screen but whenever I do so, the 
inactive screen is not surprisingly blank. I'd like to be able to see X 
persist on my external monitor when a text console is in the foreground 
and eventually to see the output of a background tty on my laptop screen 
when tty7 is in the foreground.

I know the second direction sounds harder... people have been asking 
questions about it since 2002 and the only solutions I've seen have been 
unstable kernel patches that are now dead. But I am naive enough to 
think that X could be configured to not blank the screen even when its 
own console is switched away from. After all, it's still running. Do you 
know of a way to do this? I've tried all combinations of tty and vt 
related arguments to X but haven't got it to work yet.

One thing that I think might work, is initializing a framebuffer for 
both cards and then using con2fb to move a particular console to the 
other framebuffer before starting X. I can't try this however because 
all framebuffer drivers I've tried only create a framebuffer device for 
the primary AGP card. So do you know how to disable screen blanking when 
switching VTs or how to use multiple monitors with a framebuffer driver? 
Thanks alot.