The Debian menu systems really saves you a lot of time, when you are trying to find a new installed software.

Yes you can run the applications from the command line, as I was doing these days on my Laptop with Fluxbox, but if you are using Debian or Ubuntu you can automatically create the menus using the Debian Menu System.

To install it (if you are using Debian might be installed)

sudo aptitude install menu

then run

sudo update-menus

and you will have your menus recreated, (or created) with all the available programs in it, this will work for almost all X windows managers, it is usually disabled in Gnome but you can go to:

System->Preferences->Main Menu and enable the Debian menu under Applications.

If you have just installed it, you may need to log out and log in again, to be able to see it.

Now every time a new program is installed, it will automatically added to the menu, unless you run update-menus as a normal user, and not as root.