How to locate installed applications?

[rsdotson]

Ok I've read all the things in the "Read me first" sticky including even the forum rules (was I ever glad to see no posting about religion/politics because I've seen both of them ruin forums), and done my Googling and even so I still feel a little embarassed to ask this question:

How do you normally find applications that have been installed via RPM or another package manager?

I usually try "which" or just search the entire filesystem for executable names that might be what I'm looking for, but there must be a better way. Unfortunately most programs don't add themselves to the applications drop down menu, even if installed by the add/remove programs package manager. If the executable is compiled from source then I suppose the makefile would have an indication of the path of the target executable, but what do you do whenever a binary package is installed via a package manager?

The question applies to all of the Linux versions I've tried, but right now I'm working with the AMD64 version of Fedora7 on a dual core AMD64, with 4GB RAM, and a 500GB hard drive partioned into four separate partitions with the first ext3 partition containing Fedora7 and the rest used for data at present.

Supposedly I have all these great programs installed (Pari, SciLab, Mathematica, etc), but I haven't figured out where they are or how to execute them. Shouldn't there normally be a "Readme" file in some standard place or something?

Thanks,

Ron

P.S.
I don't know how the "Thumbs down" icon got into my post. If I added it, it was accidental.

P.P.S.
I did find this tidbit about locating applications at: wyoGuide: Application location
but it isn't all that helpful as you can see:

10.1 Linux

Through the nature of the "Filesystem Hierarchy Standard" Linux is the most difficult platform for locating files for an application. At least the "Filesystem Hierarchy Standard" allows installing all files of an application under the "/opt/<appname>" directory. Unfortunately it won't work because under Linux no shell seems to expand the application path and provide it to the application in argv[0]. Hopefully this will change in a not so distant future. One might try to create a symlink in your bin directory which absolute path points to application executable, again no shell seems to expand it either. So on Linux there is no simple solution except to store the application path in the application's preferences.

Within the application directory you are free to locate any file where you like. Usually any language independent files are located just next to the executable in the same directory. Language dependent files are located in the appropriate "/<lang>" directory.

[Juan Pablo]

Ok I've read all the things in the "Read me first" sticky including even the forum rules (was I ever glad to see no posting about religion/politics because I've seen both of them ruin forums)

Congrats, that's a very good sign of progress, doing your homework before posting

Programs distribute themselves around /usr, /etc, /opt, etc and subfolders when installed.
Packages are not compiled from source when you install an RPM, this is why they are called binaries
You should be able to run the program from the command line, I have not used a RPM too much and I'm not really sure how you can check where the program installed but a direct approach would be opening the RPM with file-roller, you will find a tree resembling the one you have on your system, search for binaries there, the binaries on the RPM should be in the same folders as on your system with the same names

[rsdotson]

... but a direct approach would be opening the RPM with file-roller, you will find a tree resembling the one you have on your system, search for binaries there, the binaries on the RPM should be in the same folders as on your system with the same names

Ah ha, very good. So with this "file-roller" program I can display what is essentially a map of what will be installed and where on my system from an RPM then(?). I will give it a try. Thank you.
-- Ron

[oz]

If you like command line options, another one that can sometimes be helpful is whereis:

man whereis

[Juan Pablo]

Yes, exactly

This 'file-roller' program is the default archiving program included with GNOME, ark in KDE should do exactly the same as RPMs are most of the time just tar.gz, .gz, tar.bz2, .bz2 files renamed.