"When the shell that runs the script exits, it send a HUP signal to the processes you started. If those don't catch the signal, they will terminate. So whether just using & is sufficient depends on the application. To be safe, use nohup like that:
nohup your-program >>/dev/null 2>>/dev/null &
See the man pages for nohup and kill for more details or read the wikipedia article about nohup."
Based on the example programs you gave, it looks like you're trying to start some programs when KDE launches. If so, take a look at KDE's Autostart feature. This article discusses more and gives instructions about how to add programs to autostart.
