Gnome 3.12: Add VirtualBox machine to gnome's activities and dash

Specific virtual machines can be launched directly from gnome activities or gnome dash without the need to start standard Virtual Box GUI. For this we need to create desktop files and place them in our local applications folder, i.e., /.local/share/applications.
Example of a desktop file starting virtual machine called w7 is as follows (file name w7.desktop) These files can be created manually, but also using Virtual Box GUI. Once we have these files, it is enough just to copy them into /.local/share/applications and they will be e immediately available in the gnomes activities. From the we can just drop and drag them to dash.

If we want to create them manually, we can use the example from the above. The ids of the virtual machines can be obtained using the following vboxmanage list vms
"w7" {25e911a6-7bae-422a-84c2-30ced68d701d}


Gnome 3.12: Auto start applications with a delay

In gnome, applications can be start by copying *.desktop files into ~/.config/autostart.

The installed desktop files of your applications are in /usr/share/applications and in ~/.local/share/applications. Thus you can copy files from there into ~/.config/autostart and modify to your liking.

Off course, you can also create your own desktop files for running, or starting applications with a delay. For example, I made the desktop file called myautostart.desktop in ~/.config/autostart[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=MyStartup
Comment=Starts my applications
Exec=/bin/bash /home/put-your-user-name/.mystartups.sh
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Hidden=false
NoDisplay=false

As can be seen the file starts ~/.mystartups.sh which has the following contents:#!/bin/bash
sleep 2
exo-open /usr/share/applications/terminator.desktop
sleep 1
exo-open /usr/share/applications/chromium.desktop
The file launches terminator and chromium using desktop files with 2 and 1 second delays.