I'm a newbie to Linux (that mainly uses Windows and Mac OS X) needing some advice. I was trying to install git on a Linux machine today, and encountered some problems:

1. Not knowing the version of the installed OS, I've opened the /proc/version file which said:

   Linux version 2.6.9-42.0.2.ELsmp ([email protected]) 
   (gcc version 3.4.6 20060404 (Red Hat 3.4.6-3)) #1 SMP Thu Aug 17 17:57:31 
   EDT 2006
   

2. Then, as written in the git documents (http://git-scm.com/download/linux), I assumed I could use the yum install git command for Fedora, but got the following result.

   [root@myserver ~]# yum install git
   -bash: yum: command not found
   

3. So I tried installing yum using wget, but wasn't so lucky.

   [root@myserver ~]# wget http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/download/2.0/yum-2.0.7.tar.gz
   -bash: wget: command not found
   

4. I googled and found this page and this page, so tried installing yum with rpm, but only got a result full of question marks. (Possibly an encoding problem, hmm...)

   [root@myserver ~]# rpm -Uvh http://www.eomy.net/linux/install-yum-x86_64/wget-1.10.2-0.40E.x86_64.rpm
   http://www.eomy.net/linux/install-yum-x86_64/wget-1.10.2-0.40E.x86_64.rpm(??)?? ??????
                                                                                 ?: /var/tmp/rpm-xfer.TbuAOu: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 443e1821
   ???..                  ########################################### [100%]
   wget-1.10.2-0.40E U???????g???????
                                           wget-1.10.2-0.40E???? ??g??/usr/bin/wget ?? wget-1.10.2-0.40E U?????? ????
                                                                                                                           wget-1.10.2-0.40E???? ??g??/usr/share/man/man1/wget.1.gz ?? wget-1.10.2-0.40E U?????? ????
                                            [root@myserver ~]# 
   

5. Finally, when I typed rpm --version in the terminal, I got the below results.

   [root@myserver ~]# rpm --version
   RPM ???? - 4.3.3
   

I would like to know what I can do or possibly try now. Is it not possible to wget or yum anything in my situation? Or is there any magical tool like homebrew (http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/) that I can use?

Any comments or advice would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!