package installs that dont get to menu

[drifter]

I just switched to Mint a couple days ago with a cd I bought online mint 4.0 with gnome.
It is great I only use xp now for one thing.

My problem is that when I install a package with Synaptic and the name dosnt make it to the menu. I use synaptic to tell me where it installed the files. Then I go look. Sometimes they are not there. I look everywhere in system files. Sometimes I find pieces of the installed program in several different locations. But when I look for the file that looks like a a piece of paper with a diamond in the center to start the program I cant seem to find it.

I have a very old system and live on social security so cant upgrade system right away. I have beryl and compiz running with a lot of effects turned on and cpu only at 11 percent usage. This is great OS!!!!

[Fornhamfred]

Hello Drifter

Welcome to Mint and glad you like what you see.

Could you advise us how much ram you have please?

Also if you use the software portal does it install OK?

[drifter]

Thanks for the reply. A guy in town is building machines from old parts and he has a legal master install cd for win xp pro.
I bought my machine for $100.00. 192mb pc 100 ram and 10g hard drive.

I upgraded it a little at a time.
Pentium III 550 Mz
80g hard drive running at sytem speed ATA66
768 mb pc100 memory brand new. (my bus is only 100Mz
envidia GeForce 6200 with 2 engines on it.(Brand new board) it is a AGP 8x board but will only run at agp 2x on my system
It has 256mb video memory.

Yes software portal at mint website I got maybe 3 or 4 programs. All installed and went to menu. I downloaded Firefox 3.3
tar bal and unpacked it. I played around with the files until I found a file that looked like a piece of paper with a diamond in the middle. This particular one started firefox and I used it to make a shortcut to the menu

All packages from Synaptec say they installed ok. But they dont all make it to the menu. I have spent a lot of time looking for that little executable that turns them on but cant find it for the ones that dont get to the menu. Sometimes I think an install mistake was made and synaptec didnt catch it. So I do an uninstall of the program and synaptec does it without error messages of any kind like maybe coudnt find all dependencies or something like that. Then I do a reinstall and same problem.

Thanks for your help.