Very Newbie Question. Please Help
 

I am a week ols Mandrake (Mandriva) Linux newbie. I have installed Mandriva 10.5 LE on one of my boxes trying to learn this stuff, and get the hell away from Micro$oft.

I would like to install some packages like Limewire, BitTorrent nad even RealPlayer. I download most of them in RPM format. If I doubleclick the icon, uit says I have installed the package, but it does not list it in the menu, or even tell me where it is, just as Windoze did

I have also tried the command line install rpm -i and it says successful install.

Please tell me where the package is installed and how do I use it...

I have even tried to do a file search for the app name, and nothing shows up.

Thanks in advance,

Chris J.

if the RPMs you installed were for all distros, then it probably didn't create shortcuts. Try guessing the command in the terminal. Like "limewire" for limewire. Try to stick off of capitals, most programs don't use capitals from what I've seen.

Most executable files end up in /usr/bin but can go almost anywhere. The desktop enviornment will not create entries for newly installed programs, unless you configure it to do so. Also, the reason you may be having problems finding the executable files is because everything is case sensitive, so to a *nix system, Bittorrent is not equal to bittorrent. You can probably launch the program from the command line, but you need to know its name. If you install a program named "helper", then you could do and see everything that starts with h or H. Hopefully, you'll see your program. Then you launch it just by typing its name and hitting enter. If it isn't in /usr/bin, try /usr/local/bin, or any location that is mention when you do Peace,
JimBass

to list all the files a package has installed you can do:or parse it through grep to find files in a path containing "bin":

Try locate realplayer
or whereis realplayer
both in a terminal.

You may want to install a cool little app called Grun. It basically popups a run dialog you then navigate to where the bin file for whatever program you want to start is then click run. Pretty neat for apps that do not create a menu entry.

gRun includes features such as a history, command
completion from the history and from PATH, recognition of console mode applications and launching a terminal for them, file extension associations and a dual fork()/execvp() application launcher.

http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/contrib....0-1.i386.html

Once you've found the executable files you can easily add them into the menus manually yourself, right-click on the menu button and choose 'Edit Menus' or whatever its called.

Alternatively, to save yourself the trouble you could just create the files directly in the /usr/lib/menu directory. So for limewire create a file /usr/lib/menu/limewire and add the following text:
Update: forgot you have to run update-menus after you do this
Decide for yourself which is easier.

Also remember that Mandriva comes with a lot of packages (incl. bittorrent) in their repositories. All these packages have been specifically packaged for Mandriva so they will automatically make their own entries in the menus without you having to do anything.

Goto http://easyurpmi.zarb.org and setup your access to these repositories, you can now install software using the software installation thingo in the Mandrake Control Centre. This is pretty much essential for desktop use unless you plan on manually downloading and compiling all your software.

Thanks
 

Thanks everyone for the great replies. I think I got it now.

Thanks a mil

Chris J

As a SuSE user, could I use the same commands? Linux is Linux, right?

Yes. All except the stuff in my post (about the menu locations and using urpmi - this is distro specific) is the same across distros. However keep in mind that Debian based distros (not Suse but Debian and stuff like ubuntu etc.) use DEB packages so they won't use the rpm command.