I'm learning to use Pico in the terminal of my Mac and would like to start using it on my Fedora Core 2 Dell. When I key in Pico in the bash terminal, though, nothing happens. Is it not installed by default?

No there isn't but I believe you can use NANO, which is a clone of PICO excluding the PINE mail program.

Even better, FC2 has Joe which is like pico on steroids. Just type joe <filename> to access the commands in joe press ctrl+k and you will get a menu similar to the one you have at the bottom of the screen in pico.

You can always download the latest rpm for pico from a website such as rpmfind.net and install it yourself.

Or just learn how to use vi

Just tried out Nano - works perfectly. Thanks!

I'm so used to using pico that I even created a symbolic link so that I don't have to get used to typing nano.

That's actually really funny! I am just trying to remember the difference. As I type this I'm running of Damn Small Linux off of CD - this is the coolest thing ever!

I would really recommend against getting rpms from places like rpmfind.

Often time what you get is not packaged correctly, or wants dependencies that conflict.
Really the best thing to do is to use the tool the operating system comes with, yum.

Add the Fedora Stable repository, and optionally the rpm.livna.org repositories. Be careful about other repositories, as their quality can vary.

Now in a case like pico - I don't think that is available from Fedora Stable or Livna - so there you might need to find a src.rpm and BUILD THE SRC.RPM on your system to produce a binary you can install linked against your shared libraries. But for pico, it's not worth it - vi or (if you want to learn it) emacs are better.

...or get the tarball and run ./configure, make, make install. Not tooooooo hard.