I have a silly question about newly installed programs

[fillmont]

I just installed Kubuntu on my new laptop, and things are mostly going well.

One thing I have noted is that sometimes, newly installed programs don't show up in the applications menu.

For instance, I installed firefox, and it showed up fine under "Internet"

I also installed VLC - and it seems to not show up at all, anywhere, unless I open a command line and type it in.

Why would this be!

[rfakhrai]

Re: I have a silly question about newly installed programs

Hm, strange. For me, it shows up in KMenu>Applications>Multimedia

If you type VLC into the search box in KMenu, does it come up?

If not, you can right-click on the KMenu and click "Edit Applications" then you can manually add an entry for VLC in the Multimedia section. The command you want to put in is "vlc".

[fillmont]

Re: I have a silly question about newly installed programs

When I type in VLC in the "search" bar of the application menu, I get a gear labeled "Run VLC"

Edit: The edit applications method has another oddity: when I tried to save the new configuration, the computer told me it was Updating System Configuration, which took about 3 minutes to complete - only to start the status bar over. I waited 4 iterations before canceling.

Double Edits: I rebooted for unrelated reasons, and everything was normal when I started up again. Success!

[Snowhog]

Re: I have a silly question about newly installed programs

Not all applications that are installed appear in the K Menu immediately. I personnally believe it's poor packaging, but I could be wrong. If an application, once installed, doesn't appear in the K Menu, a restart/reboot usually results in it appearing there.

[dtr]

Re: I have a silly question about newly installed programs

Sometimes a newly installed app does not appear in the menu, not sure why. Anyway, if you log out and back in, it should be there.

[fillmont]

Re: I have a silly question about newly installed programs

Snowhog and dtr, I find that you're both correct: just takes a quick restart to get things working fine. A minor nuisance, but not a deal breaker by any means.

[rfakhrai]

Re: I have a silly question about newly installed programs

rebooting never hurts. weird behavior with the kmenu editor, though.

[blobfish]

Re: I have a silly question about newly installed programs

rebooting never hurts.

It can cause a huge problem if you reboot after a failed upgrade. Logging out and restarting the xserver will cure most of your problems.

[kubicle]

Re: I have a silly question about newly installed programs

Running 'kbuildsycoca4' should add "missing" .desktop files to the menu (logging out or rebooting should probably work, too), provided the application package has a proper .desktop menu item.

kbuildsycoca4 will read (among other things) available .desktop files and create a binary cache (/var/tmp/kde-$USER/ksycoca4) that kde (and kmenu) accesses to get the data.