setting terminal configuration and gnome startup
 

I am a real newbie, so bear with me.
Where do I put apps that I want started when gnome boots. I want to throw up some terminals in very specific locations and sizes. I use to do this with .xinitrc, is there an equivalent. Also I'd like to fire up some webpages and kick off some scripts too.

As for the terminal configuration I know you can set a lot of things in the terminal configuration GUI, but I don't see an option for the width to be set, where can I do that from the shell? I want to learn Linux the right way instead of relying too much on the GUI. Thanks guys.

After a first glance at the man pages, I suppose,
at least for xterm, you can use the -geometry option.

Other X-based terminals probably have similar options.