How do you get catkin command to work??

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My system says:

"catkin: command not found"

The official tutorials (wiki/ROS/Tutorials) use catkin_make, so there the command would be:

catkin_make [...]

which would have been installed with a default ROS installation.

After I do half of all the Youtube ROS examples in Part 1 for example, I run any catkin command from anywhere in ubuntu 16.04 and I get msgs about "catkin: command not found"

[..]

But WHY is catkin command not working?

As I wrote in my comment, we don't know which videos you are watching as you forgot to link us to them (sheeeesh). But catkin (like that, not catkin_something_something) is a script in catkin_tools, which on Ubuntu (and similar systems) must be explicitly installed with something like sudo apt install python-catkin-tools (but after you've added the ROS package repositories to your system configuration).

Uninstalled and reloaded ROS Kinetic over and over again.

This is not Windows. Un/install is not going to solve the fact that you didn't install the package.

I get almost through ROS tutorial #1. Then, tutorial says enter "catkin " something or another.

Result:

catkin: command not found.

""catkin " something or another": I doubt it says "something or another".

So I heard you need to create a non-admin user.

Did that. Been there. Got the T shirt.

Even the new non-admin user can't get catkin commands to work.

This makes no sense to me. At all.

Is catkin real or another weather balloon?

..