Very strange problem, please help.

[Shalom_Israel]

Hello and Shalom. I just installed Fedora Red Hat and had almost no problem until I started doing my homework labs. (I'm a college student) The last lab I did before Fedora crashed was "Changing file permissions." I think I somehow made /home directory read only because I can no longer log in. All I get are a lot of pop up errors, can't remember any of them, and can't get to my desktop.

Please help.

[ryptyde]

If you just installed and have nothing of any importance on the drive just reinstall. If you have important files then you can use a Fedora 11 or CentOS 5.3 LiveCD to retrieve them then reinstall.

You can possibly login as root and get to your users home directory or run "system-config-users" and try to change permissions.

PS: could also create a new user account and delete the one that is broken.

[Shalom_Israel]

Thank you for your quick reply. I could reinstall, but I need to know how to fix the problems I encounter as I go along.

I was told to never log on as root, so I don't know how. Could you show me how?

[Rubberman]

I presume that this is your workstation or laptop? If so, then log in as root or start in single-user mode. Then you can fix the permissions you mis-set on your home directory, etc.

[Shalom_Israel]

I'm sorry, I forgot to mention what my system was. I have an emachine T6216 desktop.

[Shalom_Israel]

I have the command line up, how do I set default permission to my /home file?

Thank you.

[Shalom_Israel]

I fixed it. I used the terminal and typed chmod 755 /home and restarted. Thank you for your help.

Shalom.

[Rubberman]

You can also use symbolic permissions, such as: chmod u+rwx,go+rx,go-w /home/user
That will set the user/owner permissions to rwx, and the permissions for group and other to rx, resulting in the same results as: chmod 755 /home/user
It really isn't any different, but I think it's clearer, and not dependent upon bit order and needing to think in octal.