I am new to cassandra ! Have downloaded the apacahe cassandra 2.1.2 package and initialy was able to connect to cqlsh but then after installing CCM i am unable to connect ,
If you're in the cassandra directory, run:
bin/cqlsh
If you check the cqlsh you're running with which cqlsh i suspect you're hitting the ccm one and missing something in your path.
which cqlsh