I have Rocky Linux 8.7 on my workstation. To install it, I started from a minimal system and then added components (Base package group, X11, KDE, applications) as needed.
I just found out that my whatis command is not working properly:
Wild guess is that the database has not been created yet. You might have to update it as per this:
index databases are used during the search, and are updated by the
mandb program. Depending on your installation, this may be run by a
periodic cron job, or may need to be run manually after new manual
pages have been installed. To produce an old style text whatis data‐
base from the relative index database, issue the command:
whatis -M manpath -w '*' | sort > manpath/whatis
where manpath is a manual page hierarchy such as /usr/man.
Another thought is maybe a minimal install does not include the man pages.
OK, a simple sudo mandb did the job. I’m puzzled though that RHEL/Rocky doesn’t setup an automatic cronjob for this very basic task. Nearly all other distributions do that for you.