I have installed Mozilla Thunderbird but it has not appeared in any menus in the KDE4 or 3, so I cant click on it to start it. The files are all there in /usr/lib/mozilla-thunderbird-2.0.018. Anyone any ideas??

I have found that I need to log out (end the current session), then back in to KDE in recent versions for newly installed software to appear in the KDE menu system. I have also found that this does not always work. When it does not, I ALT+Click the K menu, and select menu editor, then add the menu item manually (mostly a point-and-click operation).

HTH,

Thats just it the program is not visible in any menu to add! I even tried uninstalling it with MCC and then reinstalling to no avail. KDE4 does some weird things.

open menu > tools > konsole terminal and type the following command:

mozilla-thunderbird
or
thunderbird

both do the same
if u get a not found orsimilar msg then its not installed properly
and for confirm check these folders/files :
/etc/thunderbird.cfg
‎/usr/bin/mozilla-thunderbird
‎/usr/bin/thunderbird
‎/usr/lib/mozilla-thunderbird-2.0.0.17 (or whatever version u have)

Thank you. That works Thunderbird starts OK, but why has it disappeared from the menus. I'll check for the prescence of the other files. Can I write a batch file to automate the start up?

( i havent try this on mandriva but is should be ok ) the simplest and easy way would be to just add the command to /etc/rc.d/rc.local.
This would get executed once when the computer boots.
A better but more complex way would be to create a script for it in /etc/rc.d/init.d/ and then make links to it in the relevent runlevels /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/, /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/ etc This way the command can be controlled a little better and can be started and stopped when switching runlevels.
For more info check the stracture of other lines and files in there and their man pages.

Thanks ghost333 I will try that.

Try putting it in ~/.kde4/Autostart/ instead of the rc.d files, rc.* is generally for services not desktop applications and will likely try to run thunderbird before you've logged in - which obviously won't work.

OH ididnt know about that, how can i set a script to run as root in kde4/autorun ? just on start

To run a script as root on start (of the system I'm assuming?) call it from /etc/rc.d/rc.local
But to automatically start a desktop app like Thunderbird, which you obviously only can run when the user is logged in use KDE's autostart. If you're on KDE4 there's a KDE Control Panel thingy to configure autostart

Edit: Anyway none of this should be necessary, the menu items appear when you install a package almost instantly in recent versions of Mandriva (after they dumped the Debian menu system for the standardised freedesktop.org one). So if they're not it's a bug.

I'll report my problem as a bug then. Thanks to all