Solved: bg

You are looking for job control which is supported by most shells. See this article for an introduction. At some point you might also want to read the official documentation for bash which is the default shell in Ubuntu.

In short: To start a job automatically in the background put an & after the program call

program &

You can also stop programs with CTRLz and then put them into the background later with bg

program

^Z bg

To get them to run in the foreground again use fg