Mourning winxp & Getting along with ubuntu 8.10

My windows xp os is FUBAR-ed because of the Windows Genuine Authentication Program. I wonder why it happened so late though? Got my pc somewhere in 2007. A year passed. In an attempt to understand how partioning works, I formatted my whole machine by reinstalling os. And somewhere around that time I had successfully installed ubuntu 8.10 onto a second hard-disk I had. But my bios was configured to boot xp which was in the 1st hard disk. I think it was that reformatting which kind of delayed/offset the chaos to happen at a later date viz a few weeks back.

Now I've set my bios to boot ubuntu. It aint all that a great os, but I am slowly getting used to loving it. After much googling I've successfully installed tweetdeck on my gnome desktop. I was wondering how to launch it from the run application dialog today. It aint all that complicated as I thought it was...

Most of your executables are soft linked or symbolically linked. Its just like shortcuts in windows. All you have to do is place a link in one such place your Run Application dialog will look into. That one such place is /usr/bin. So to place a link there you need to navigate to that folder and create the link there.

$ cd /usr/bin
$ ls -s [path-to-ur-fav-program] [shortcut-name]

Now if you invoke the run application dialog (using Alt + F2 viz similar to run command in windows) and type your [shortcut-name], you can run your fav program.

Happy ubuntuing...