Where is the link to my installed programs?

If you log off and on, do they show?

New to Ubuntu: read the Ubuntu Manual, it's very informative: http://ubuntu-manual.org/
Click on the "download Button" to download the latest PDF version.

No. They never show except as I had explained before. Also, even the place where I find them listed, I am not able to launch them.

Thank you, marcobra, I appreciate the link to the Ubuntu Manual. I'll download it tomorrow and put a copy of it on all of my devices. I'm sure it is a lot to digest. Too bad it does not read it to me! Well, maybe there's an App for that on my iPad.

Make sure you are the owner of your home folder with

cd /home; sudo chown -R $USER:$USER ./$USER

this may help.

I built all three of my PCs and I am the only person who has ever used any of them. Each PC has only one user.

You aren't there are MANY usernames on your system. If you run gui apps with sudo instead of gksudo you can damage ownerships. The fact you built the systems is of zero value to the thread.

I need to read a book on Ubuntu.

First try the good Ubuntu Manual... see my previous link above.

Having the same problem. Package shows as installed in Software Centre and in Synaptic Package Manager (SPM), but does not show under Applications (or System).

I can't find anything in the manual.

Tried fixing broken package in SPM - nil result.

Hi,

Not all installed programs/packages are showing up an entry in menus. For example, if the author has not designed it, it will not add itself to the menus. Finally some installed programs are run directly from the command line or from the popup window after you'd pressed ALT+F2.

Usually programs are installed in /usr/bin/, sometimes they will be in /opt/

So, usually to find the program, open a Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and you can use some commands like:

ls -l /usr/bin/

that will list the files under the directory /usr/bin/
that you can combine (pipe to) an other command like grep to filter for a particular string. Example if I want to see if the programm "ffmpeg" is installed I could the following commands in a terminal:

vdquynh@quynh:~$ ls -l /usr/bin | grep mpeg

which actually returned (from my computer):

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 84092 2010-04-23 22:17 ffmpeg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 17804 2009-07-22 06:52 lav2mpeg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 39356 2009-07-22 06:53 mpeg2enc
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1638 2009-07-22 06:52 mpegtranscode
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 514184 2010-04-17 07:07 ppmtompeg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 9640 2009-07-22 06:53 yuv4mpeg
vdquynh@quynh:~$

you can also use the command "apropos" followed by a keyword, like this:

vdquynh@quynh:~$ apropos mpeg

which will return:

extract_dca (1) - extract DTS Coherent Acoustics audio from a MPEG stream.
extract_dts (1) - extract DTS Coherent Acoustics audio from a MPEG stream.
ffmpeg (1) - FFmpeg video converter
lav2mpeg (1) - easy conversion of lav files to mpeg
mp2enc (1) - Simple MPEG-1 layer-II audio encoder
mpeg2enc (1) - MPEG-1/2 encoder
...
...
yuvplay (1) - Display YUV4MPEG2 streams (using SDL)
yuvscaler (1) - UPscales or DOWNscales a YUV4MPEG2 stream to a specifi...
vdquynh@quynh:~$

Hope that helped.

Vu Do Quynh

Thanks. Using those commands, I can see that one program is installed in /usr/bin. However, it does not launch from the pop-up window if told to run from file. And is not appearing on the list of known applications in the pop-up window.

The other is in /bin, but behaves the same way.

btw, I have tried removing and re-installing.

Hi,

In the popup window for entering the command (after pressing ALT+F2), you may try to check the box which says to launch the program in a terminal.

You can also just type the program name in a terminal (using the TAB key to do automatic completion of the name) to launch the program (but you'll neeed to keep the terminal window opened as long as you want to run the program launched in this way.

Thanks again.

If I run in a terminal, the terminal window opens for a second, and then closes again.

Both programs (Magicrescue and Scrounge) were downloaded from the Software Centre.

Hi,

I just installed magicrescue to my desktop. Seems working without problem : I can launch it from the terminal, although it needs arguments to be passed for working (i.e. actually doing something).

vdquynh@Lucid-desktop:~$ magic [TAB]
magicrescue magicsort
vdquynh@Lucid-desktop:~$ magicrescue
Usage: magicrescue [-I FILE] [-M MODE] [-O [+-=][0x]OFFSET] [-b BLOCKSIZE]
 -d OUTPUT_DIR -r RECIPE1 [-r RECIPE2 [...]] DEVICE1 [DEVICE2 [...]]

  -b Only consider files starting at a multiple of BLOCKSIZE.
  -d Mandatory. Output directory for found files.
  -r Mandatory. Recipe name, file or directory.
  -I Read input file names from this file ("-" for stdin)
  -M Produce machine-readable output to stdout.
  -O Resume from specified offset (hex or decimal) in the first device.

You can type "man magicrescue" to read the manual:

vdquynh@Lucid-desktop:~$ man magicrescue
MAGICRESCUE(1) Magic Rescue MAGICRESCUE(1)

NAME
       magicrescue - Scans a block device and extracts known file types by
       looking at magic bytes.

SYNOPSIS
       magicrescue [ options ] devices

DESCRIPTION
       Magic Rescue opens devices for reading, scans them for file types it
       knows how to recover and calls an external program to extract them. It
       looks at "magic bytes" in file contents, so it can be used both as an
       undelete utility and for recovering a corrupted drive or partition. It
       works on any file system, but on very fragmented file systems it can
       only recover the first chunk of each file. These chunks are sometimes
       as big as 50MB, however.