how to start a new thread from a GUI

[Wen Jiang]

Thanks for the advices. It looks like the easy way is still the spawn method
to submit and forget. The real worker process is a very computational
intensive job which might take days to weeks to finish. during the running
time, the user is likely to logout the X session, this could be really hard
since no GUI process could survive the quit from X session as I understand.
The solution I tend to use now is to write out the parameters and let the
standalone program to read in the parameters and run in the detached mode.
so the worker program would be able to run at background even the X session
is done.I have the worker class method runable as a standalone program
before I got the GUI anyway. The GUI could then be restarted later to probe
for the progress and intermediate results from the log files.

Wen