I did ls -l and can't see mediacenter21 in the folder.. Where does it put it? Anyway, that works. I can see the program!
Traditionally the linux filesystem put system-wide commands in the /bin directory, and anything in that directory can normally be executed from anywhere. Many modern linux distros (including Arch) put all commands in /usr/bin (where user installed commands were traditionally placed), and I think that's where mediacenter21 is. But it's in one of those two places as I recall.
But it's not super relevant where it actually is though. If it helps to think of it this way, the reason you can execute mediacenter21 is the same reason you can execute ls or other shell commands; they're all together somewhere. The strict technical answer is that you can execute all commands in a directory that's included in your users PATH environment variable. That's useful to know if you ever want to write scripts to be executed by cron or the root user as they don't necessarily have the same PATH as you do. If you want to see what directories are in your PATH, type
echo $PATH
In answer to your question, I'm using the Audiophile Linux shell. It only has a limited pre-prepared list of programs available in its custom right-click start menu.
Ah that makes sense; it's probably a modified version of openbox; if so you could probably easily edit the right-click menu (it's just in a human readable .xml file somewhere).
I am not sure how long I'll persist with ap-linux. I get the feeling now from lots of linux forum reading that it's not anything special. But as you told me earlier, dabbling in arch linux is good for learning!
My advice if you're starting over is to start from scratch with Vanilla Arch and complete the learning odyssey!
Thanks a lot. Hopefully you won't hear from me for a while ;-)
Glad to help, and I hope you'll be back, we need more linux enthusaists around here