You have a few options...
First off, a borderless terminal is a bit much for simply viewing messages, head over to
www.freshmeat.net and search for root-tail or variations of that, it's likely going to be more along the lines of what you want.
Second: You will need to give your user read permissions on that file, OR add a special group that can read that file, then add your user to that group ( a bit more secure ). If you wish to be secure, reply back and I'll go a bit more in depth on how to accomplish that. Otherwise, use the chmod (man chmod) command to give READ permissions to everyone on that file:
chmod 744 /var/log/messages
HTH
Cool