Synaptic installs not installed

[Peter Garrett]

On Fri, 21 Apr 2006 10:07:10 +0300
Avraham Hanadari <rufus at hanadari.net> wrote:

> On at least two occasions I have selected and installed packages which I 
> was later unable to find. "Remind" and "3-D Chess" are the most recent. 
> Evidently there is a step here which I am ignoring. It is clearly marked 
> in Synaptic that the programs are installed. I reinstalled Remind just 
> to be sure. I've even searched in Add Applications, and they do not 
> appear there. What have I missed?

Some packages ( particularly in the universe and multiverse repositories )
still lack the *.desktop files needed to comply with the freedesktop
guidelines. This may be the problem with the ones you cite.

There are a couple of things you can do. One is to install the "menu" and
"menu-xdg" packages. This should give you a complete "Debian" menu, as a
submenu of the Applications menu (you get a Debian swirl icon, with a
*very* large many-branched tree starting from it).

If you prefer to make you own menu entries, you can hunt down the
executables for the installed package by issuing

dpkg -L <packagename>

which gives a full listing of the files installed by the package ( notice
that the -L is upper case ). As some packages have a lot of files, you can
do

dpkg -L <packagename> | less

or to find the executables

dpkg -L <packagename> | grep bin

For instance according to "apt-file list remind" (yet another useful tool
for any package in the repos whether installed or not), the "remind"
package has the following files included:

remind: usr/bin/cm2rem
remind: usr/bin/rem2ps
remind: usr/bin/remind
remind: usr/bin/tkremind

3dchess is a game, so its executable file is in /usr/games

apt-file list 3dchess | grep games

3dchess: usr/games/3Dc

For some reason apt-file leaves the leading "/ " off the paths :)

Finally, to track down more info you can do 

apropos <keyword>

to output possibly relevant "man" pages.

Whew... hope that helps a bit !

Peter


-- 

Linux User #343161