Does an Inner Product Always Induce a Metric?

An inner product on a real or complex vector space $V$ is a bilinear map $V\times V\to K$ (where $K$ is the ground field, either $\bf R$ or $\bf C$), that satisfies conjugate symmetry and positive-definiteness; for the second property to make sense we have to realize that $\langle x,x\rangle$ is real for all $x\in V$ (this follows from the first property actually), so it makes sense to say it is nonnegative.

The map $\|x\|=\langle x,x\rangle^{1/2}$ will in fact be a vector space norm, and this norm induces a metric via the formula $d(u,v)=\|u-v\|$. The nontrivial part of checking these facts is using Cauchy-Schwarz for establishing the triangle inequality (fix an orthogonal basis to do it in).

It is not possible to define an inner product on a vector space over a field of positive characteristic, by definition. It is, however, possible to define bilinear forms $(\cdot,\cdot):{\bf F}_q^n\times{\bf F}_q^n\to{\bf F}_q$, and two vectors are orthogonal with respect to it if $(a,b)=0$. In most cases of positive characteristic and dimension greater than one it is possible to find an $x$ which is orthogonal to itself under the usual coordinate-determined dot product (this is actually an interesting number-theoretic question: over which finite fields and numbers $n$ do there exist $n$ scalars not all zero whose squares sum to zero?)

It is also not possible to define a metric $X\times X\to {\bf F}$ where $\bf F$ is a field of positive characteristic: by definition in the first place it would have to take real values, but furthermore it could not satisfy the triangle inequality since there can be no ordering in positive characteristic.