I'm starting a new contract with a shop that knows little about Linux and I'm helping pave the way. I've "inherited" an existing Linux install (RHEL4). I want to setup some tools but I find that yum is not installed. Is this normal for a RH box ? I thought that the RH up2date tool used yum under the covers.
Not for RHEL4 it doesn't, althought up2date is capable of using(fumbling through) yum repositories.
The easiest way to put yum on a RHEL box is to get yum package and associated dependencies from CentOS. Keep in mind that there are no publicly available yum repositories for official RHEL packages. You'll either have to use up2date, create your own repository, or convert to CentOS for the base and updates repositories. Beyond that, 3rd party repositories like dag, dries, rpmforge etc work just fine with rhel using yum.
I suspect the answer is to find & download a yum rpm for redhat and install it via rpm but I want to be sure I dont do something stupid on a client system.
If it's a 'server' running KDE it may be too late for that already...
/long live the console