"apropos" /"man -k" Not Working

#1 (**permalink**) 26-Dec-2007, 07:44

Just installed openSuSE 10.3 on desktop box and have discovered that potentially one of the most useful shell commands (i.e. "apropos" or "man -k") not working. Also "whatis" does not work either. Have installed openSuSE 10.3 onto laptop (from the same installation media) and all these commands work fine. What configuration is necessary to activate all these commands? Any help much appreciated cheers.

#2 (**permalink**) 26-Dec-2007, 07:54

This was found before on a text only installation. The solution then was:

From my earlier Unix knowledge I knew that for man -k to work some database(s) must be there. This was normaly generated by whatis. After looking in the man page about man I decided to run mandb. After ignoring a lot of messages about warnings, failures, etc. I could do man -k man and it gave a lot of results.

When it helps: fine, but I don't understand then why you have this on a 'normal' installation.

#3 (**permalink**) 26-Dec-2007, 11:32

The only difference I can think of is that with the laptop it was two-three days before a uninstalled beagle, were as with the recent installation I uninstalled beagle immediately.

#4 (**permalink**) 26-Dec-2007, 11:40

Cheers hcvv mandb did the trick.

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