I start the gaim , Kmail and other programs using terminal or shell. Of course, I use & to run the commnad in background.

However, when I close the TERMINAL or SHELL the programs that I started from terminal are gone..

Is it possible to do in such way, even I close terminal programs still will run?

Thanks

sure, run them off the Menu, or make an applet on the navigation bar and click on, do not run in xterm window.
Also, there is sometimes else you could add to when you run something on an xterm so that it doesn't run off of that window. I'll check what it is, and post it as well.

ahh, found it in my notes

at the prompt type the name of the application, i.e.:

[prompt]: gaim >& /dev/null &

that's it, or like I said you can just run it off an applet at the bar.

Or you can place that in your .xinitrc file, or similar, right above the exec <wm> section.

So something like this might be your xinitrc file:

exec gkrellm &
exec gaim &
exec xfce

Cool

eehmm, which I don't know how to do, nor could I after what you said MasterC,

How do you kill the terminal or shell? If you use the menu bar, you're killing
all the children of that shell as well as the shell. If you type "exit" in the
shell, it should die without killing its children.

You could always use nohup to keep things going...

that's why you run things that don't run on xterms, so that you can kill the xterm without any problems

Yeah, but then you limit yourself to working like a windows (l)user, in that
you are only able to use what has an icon on your desktop. Not very
*NIX like. . . The command line is the reason I use *NIX -- it allows ME
to control what programs I have access to, not the distributor of the
system (mostly, and with linux and open source, I'm not even limited to
what the distributor packages).
Giving "mikeshn" an answer to the question of why something happens
provides the power to use linux more effectively and efficiently. What is
done with that power is up to the user.

Try using <Alt>+<F2> to bring up a command prompt, and start your app from there, also in your gnome/kde controlcenter there will be an option to restore settings, that way when you log out every app running will start next time you log in.