First I would like to say that I am completely disgusted with the complexity of installing an LINUX OS. After several attempts with different releases of varied linux.tar.bz2 iso’s , yadda yadda yadda. I have at least learned the proper method of burning a bootable disk image. I have achieved semi success on different installation types. EG.- disk mount without partition, two primary partitions ( win98, mandrake8.2 i-686), Devil Linux cd base with floppy config, and finally cool Linux cd base( which was finally successful ) However: Common to all installations- Bash does not recognize the ‘whois command’ or many commands that im trying to run for that matter. What am I doing wrong? It is the UNIX’s base of powerful command features that I am trying to access. WITH NO AVAIL!!! In my process for higher learning I have succeeded in deleting all partitions and completely reformatting my hard drive! With the exception of 1 partition that refuses to be deleted and has resulted in an 88% overlap!!!!!!!! Not to mention 10 gigs of lost hard disk space. Hold on. I think im going to puke. So why all this trouble? Why not? How else is a responsible haxor wanna-b3 supposed to grow and mature? I noticed when trying to log into a telnet session at troycable.net that you guys are using the FreeBSD i-686. Is this recommended for a newbie? Can you please give me any suggestions? Thanks Fred.

Most likely the command w, who, whoami and whois all exist but are not in your current path. You can look for them with find / -name whois You can tell what your path is set to with the output of set

Have you actually got it installed? If you are using an rpm based distro, you can find out by typing: #rpm -q whois and it should return a version number if you have it.