Just installed a turnkey linux ubuntu/apache/tomcat vm image. After some trouble getting the bridged network adapter installed on win7, I wanted to check network access to and from the vm. Verified that I could hit the vm's web server from the host, and wanted to test that I could also hit the internet from the vm, so I did this on the shell cmd line:

curl www.google.com

Which responded with this:

-sh: curl: not found

Wanting to make sure it wasn't busted networking, I tried this, and got the same response:

curl localhost

That leads me to think that wasn't curl saying it can't find the requested url, but the shell saying it can't find the curl cmd. So I did this:

sudo apt-get install curl

Response was:

-sh: sudo: not found

So now I'm confused. Sudo has to be installed, doesn't it, and apt-get? Both because they're fundamental I think, and because you couldn't install anything else without them, if you see what I mean.

Is it a security issue, that my account (which I just created via webmin) doesn't have rights to sudo? I added myself to the secondary group 'sudo' via webmin, though I wasn't sure that was legit, logged out and back in, no change, so I undid it.

I read that /etc/sudoers controls access to sudo, but as far as I can tell from both the cmd line and the webmin text editor open file dlg, it doesn't exist. Do I need to create it? Is it normal to have to do that, or a system defect?

Or is it something else that my ignorant self is or isn't doing?