running centos 5.6. Gnome Desktop. at the top of my desktop are drop down menus: Applications, Places, System. And under these are sub-menus. Yet using package manager I see thousands of programs. I don't see many of these programs in the drop down menus. Where are they?

For example, I installed, "system-config-date-1.8.12-4.el5.centos.noarch", described as "A graphical interface for modifying system date and time." Yes, I know how to use the date command in a shell window from root. But as an example, where would I find this program on my system and how would I run it? How do I know where any installed package is going to be stored?

Thanks,

Some programs are for root (administrator) user. It will be under System->Administration

You're right - it's there under system/administration/date & time. And when you run it, it says it's running system-config-date. So that was a bad example, since it is listed in the drop down menus.

My overall question still remains. In general, after installing package X, if X is not listed in the menus, where do I find X and how do I run it?

Most programs have no GUI interface. Hence, they are not included in the menu. You obviously have to launch them from the command line.

Additionally, as far as I remember you can right click on the menu in the panel and there should be an option to customise it. You can tick/untick any items that are included in the menu.

HTH

ok, that makes sense now. To launch, you need the program name. If the package name is
system-config-date-1.8.12-4.el5.centos.noarch, you would use,
system-config-date
as the name and type that alone into the command line. Note that you can even use the command line invocation of a program that is listed in the menu, if you know its name.

I do not yet know how to correlate the menu program name with it's underlying command line program name, but would have a hard time describing when I would need to know that.

My initial questions were,
(1) where would I find this program on my system, and
(2) how would I run it?

The answer to (2) was covered above. Here is the answer to (1): Run
which system-config-date
Doing so will show:
/usr/bin/system-config-date

And sure enough, the number of programs in /usr/bin for my system is 2,372. "Thousands" by my initial estimates.