If you want an application to start (or a command to be run) when you login you need to edit your bash_profile or .bash_login file. That's standard anyway, I am assuming comlab computers work the same way.

This file is a just shell script, and there are plenty of things to help you with that which you can find via google.

If you want an application to start (or a command to be run) when you start a new terminal (shell, prompt), put it in your .bashrc file. If you use the bash shell, which is the default. If you don't you probably know enough that you won't be reading this page, but the rc file will be called something like .cshrc or similar.

Like the login-startup files, these are shell scripts.

If you want an application to start when you log in to a GNOME/fwvm session (I think is the default on everyone's machine?) it's more complex. Other GUIs will be different, and I haven't experimented with them at all. Gnome is complex. When Gnome starts it reads a whole bunch of files. One of these is a sessions file, your sessions file is ~/.gnome2/sessions. If that file doesn't exist it reads a default.sessions file stored somewhere else, I forget where. This file is a strange format, human readable and I guess editable, but isn't a shell script or anything like that.

The standard application used to modify this file is apparently under the System»Preferences»Sessions menu, but I can't find this in the menus anywhere, there is a Desktop»Sessions menu or something like that but that does something else entirely. However I think you can start the relevant application from the command line: [1632][chrf@clpc2 ~]$ gnome-session-properties.

How this applet works also isn't completely clear to me, the web documentation is somewhat helpful (google it) but not completely. Anyway you can add start up scripts, applications etc via one of the tabs of this applet. And that works - I've used it to run a python script which rotates my background for me.