Launching applications from a terminal with specific window size and location

When you log in using KDM, there's a menu called "session type", which you can use to choose which window manager or desktop environment to start.

It sounds like in your case the "xterm session" or "fallback session" is selected. If you select KDE instead, it should start up correctly.

I got the answer here.

this would be the script to maximize it to the right half of the screen:

#!/bin/bash
# resizes the window to full height and 50% width and moves into upper right corner

#define the height in px of the top system-bar:
TOPMARGIN=27

#sum in px of all horizontal borders:
RIGHTMARGIN=10

# get width of screen and height of screen
SCREEN_WIDTH=$(xwininfo -root | awk '$1=="Width:" {print $2}')
SCREEN_HEIGHT=$(xwininfo -root | awk '$1=="Height:" {print $2}')

# new width and height
W=$(( $SCREEN_WIDTH / 2 - $RIGHTMARGIN ))
H=$(( $SCREEN_HEIGHT - 2 * $TOPMARGIN ))

# X, change to move left or right:

# moving to the right half of the screen:
X=$(( $SCREEN_WIDTH / 2 ))
# moving to the left:
#X=0; 

Y=$TOPMARGIN

wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -b remove,maximized_vert,maximized_horz && wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -e 0,$X,$Y,$W,$H

To move to the left, just change the X-Line to X=0. (If you use Ubuntu Unity, you need to adapt RIGHTMARGIN too I use RIGHTMARGIN=102)

defining the right margins this solves the bug, that the second time you call it, it moved to the very top of the screen, ignoring the top-toolbar.