Installed programs in Ubuntu - not in the menus

Q I've installed Kmoon and KWeather in both Dapper Drake and now in Gutsy, but neither runs. They don't show up in the menus, and when I try to start from Konsole, I get "command not found" I used to love both these applets. Locate finds the files; but perhaps they are not installed in the correct directories? I'm a beginner and don't know how to evaluate (or correct) the situation if that's what is wrong.

A Neither of these are standalone programs, they are both applets for KDE's Kicker taskbar. This means you cannot 'run' them, either from a menu item or a shell. You can see exactly what files a packages installs using dpkg. For example

dpkg -L kmoon

shows all the files in the kmoon package. A quick way to find any programs installed by a package is to search for paths containing 'bin/' since programs are generally installed into one of /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin or /usr/sbin, like this:

dpkg -L kmoon | grep bin/

In this case it gives no output, because no executable programs are installed. To use these programs, right-click on an empty area of the Kicker panel and select 'Add Applet to Panel...' This opens a window detailing all the Kicker applets installed on your system, from which you can select those that you want to add. If there is no blank space on your panel, click on the drag bar to the left of an existing applet and go to the panel menu from there.

Follow us on Identi.ca or Twitter