I have a habit of wanting to start a certain number of applications each time I login into a gnome session. In particular these are:
A gnome shell
The VLC media player
A Webbroser
The LibreOffice Application
To achieve this, you can write a shell script like this:
#!/bin/sh
# start a few services
bash -c "sleep 2; /usr/bin/gnome-terminal &"
bash -c "sleep 5; /usr/bin/vlc &"
bash -c "sleep 10; /usr/bin/firefox &"
bash -c "sleep 15; /usr/bin/libreoffice &"
exit 0
Place this script in the following folder:
~/bin/startupservices.sh
and make it executable.
You can then register the script with the system under:
System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications
Et Voila! Next time you boot into your system or simply login to your user profile, your services will be started for you.