Help ! I have just locked up my partners account

[Boo]

Don't Panic!

you have just screwed up the permissions on their files.

so what you do is look at the permissions on your home directory and replicate them on the other home directory.

open a terminal, look at the permissions on all the dir
run:
ls -l /home

it should look like this but with more directories.
drwxr-xr-x 50 boo boo 4096 2007-07-25 15:12 boo
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 2007-07-01 10:19 lost+found

so to change the permissions on their home directory run:
sudo chmod 755 /home/partners_home

try loging on as your partner again.

if this did not work we will have to look deeper.
and post the results of the ls command.

[scorp123]

The result of ls follow

drwxr-xr-x 31 aiden aiden 4096 2007-07-25 12:53 aiden
drw-rw-rw- 56 frog frog 4096 2007-07-25 01:39 frog

The "execute" permission on a directory means "being able to change into it". So by taking away that bit you blocked access to the directory. Read and write permissions on a directory are not enough ... you also need to be able to "execute" it = change into it.

when I try to change the permissiond using chmod 755, it yells me that permission is denied.

Did you use sudo ?? Doesn't look like it.

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sudo chmod 755 /home/frog

I don't really know what I'm doing with chmod 755 but I did find the permissions "-R u+w" on the internet

Different notations. The manual is your friend:

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man chmod

And a few words of wisdom:

*NEVER* *EVER* execute recursive commands (parameter: -R !!) unless you *precisely* know what you are doing, OK? You want to play safe? Fine, then follow our instructions and forget about reading stuff on the Internet which you don't seem to understand at the moment. Better come back here and ask us, OK?

Furthermore, the parameter there you suggested "u+w" doesn't help in your case ... it only gives the user the "write" permission which in your case frog already has .... it's the "execute" permission that's missing, that would be either a u+rwx to use that notation (but *not* recursive -R !!) or the command we suggested above:

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sudo chmod 755 /home/frog

Again, the manual is your friend ....

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man chmod
man chown

[scorp123]

We decided that there wasn't anything of real value on the hard drive so I re-installed Mint.

Overkill

Thanks for the advice and I didn't relaise there is a manual,

Yes, UNIX-like OS such as Linux ship with built-in manuals that even contain useful information that go way beyond the limited "help" output you'd get from a MS-DOS or Windows program. Once you've seen the manuals you will find it hard to understand why people say that UNIX-like OS are "user unfriendly" .... Those manuals really explain everything. Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page

Another very useful command is apropos .... In case you find yourself in a terminal all of a sudden and don't know how to do a certain thing ... ask apropos! Let's suppose your web browser icon vanished somehow and you don't know how to invoke it via a terminal ... OK, a web browser has to do something with the web .. right? So we simply ask apropos what it knows about this topic: the web.

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apropos web

Result: apropos will happily inform you about all the commands it knows that have something to do with this topic you asked about:

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> apropos web
firefox (1)          - a Web browser for X11 derived from the Mozilla browser
gnome-www-browser (1) - a Web browser for X11 derived from the Mozilla browser
LWP (3pm)            - The World-Wide Web library for Perl
lwp-download (1p)    - Fetch large files from the web
lwp-rget (1p)        - Retrieve web documents recursively
LWP::RobotUA (3pm)   - a class for well-behaved Web robots
LWP::UserAgent (3pm) - Web user agent class
mozilla (1)          - a Web browser for X11 derived from the Mozilla browser
mozilla-firefox (1)  - a Web browser for X11 derived from the Mozilla browser
ooweb (1)            - OpenOffice.org office suite
screem (1)           - A GNOME website development environment
sensible-browser (1) - sensible editing, paging, and web browsing
sensible-editor (1)  - sensible editing, paging, and web browsing
sensible-pager (1)   - sensible editing, paging, and web browsing
update-ms-fonts (8)  - download updated Microsoft Web fonts
w3m (1)              - a text based Web browser and pager
www-browser (1)      - a text based Web browser and pager
x-www-browser (1)    - a Web browser for X11 derived from the Mozilla browser

So that stuff it spitted out on the left column are actual system commands that will launch programs ... and each of them usually ships with their own manual page ...

So armed with "apropos" and "man" you can get pretty far ...

I'll take a look at that anyway and maybe I'll learn something along the way.

You just did

I bet you guys get slightly sick of us ex-windose user

Nah, don't worry. What really worries me sometimes is people getting my very very dry and sarcastic downright mean sense of humor wrong ... Oh well. I am one filthsy little hobbitses sometimes I guess ... or something like that.

Regards

[grimdestripador]

Bloody hell Scorp123

Can you lot make Mint any easier to use !!!!!!!!!

Thanks for that, I'll have to write it down incase I do something stupid again

I'm the nice Gollum, and Mint is my preciousssssssss

Its just a steep learning curve. People use windows for 5 years then assume they know computers well. To realize that clicking through wizards they weren't learning to use a computer but rather a proprietary user environment. Not to say that linux lacks in some areas, but generally are in the name of security.