I'm using Debian Lenny.

Scenario:

Sometimes I will be using gnome and executing a script. Sometimes the scripts take a while to execute because of their tasks. From time to time, gnome will halt/freeze, and my script (which would have been executed in gnome-terminal) will be caught in the crossfire.

I want to be able to have a kind of nautilus script that opens a tty for the user and executes the script there.

How do I do this?

I guess I would want tty9?
I don't want to login for the user either.
I want these kind of things to be automatic.

I want to be able do something like this while in gnome:

$ backgroundexec ./script.sh

See the gnome-terminal window close. And then hit Ctrl+Alt+F9 and see the script executing there.

I would set up the job to run in batch by using the at utility.
Pipe the output to a log file. This is what I do with my Folding At Home software. I can read the log file to see the progress of the application.

You may need to install the at utility. It is not installed by default on all distributions.

The at utility will run the job in a system queue so it will not be affected if Gnome or X hangs unless the cause of your window manager hangup is due to a kernel level problem.

On the other hand it might be better to diagnose and fix the cause of your Gnome/X performance problem.

If I'm running some long script, I usually:
1. open a terminal or console
2. start up a screen session
3. start my script
4. detach my screen session

At a later point in time, from any terminal or console I can re-attach the screen session and check up on things.

The screen manual is very good. You can get to it from the last link above or probably by typing info screen at the command line once you have screen installed. It's a GNU program, so it has a great "info" manual