Hello,
I recently installed Linux Mint (13) and now I have a big problem: at start up I get the message: "Couldn't update ICEauthority file /home/wvanes/.ICEauthority" I have tried several commands as: chown en chmod en even mount, but the only answer I ever get is: "/home is read-only".
Apparently the problem is /home being read-only and there seems to be no way to change that.
Any help is very much appreciated.
Regards,
wvanes

There are a number of explanations on how to deal with this available through search engines. The first thing I would check is /etc/fstab. Make sure it tries to mount /home as rw, not ro.

Thank you, sgosnell. As you may have noticed, I am quite new as a Linux adept and I would appreciate it very much, if you could supply me with some commands on how to attack the possible mounting of /etc/fstab.
I did, however, a few things in the mean time (I picked something up here and there on the internet):
df /home/wvanes/.ICEauthorty # to check its mounting; it appears to be /
mount -o remount,rw / # after this, I could remove .ICEauthority:
rm -f /home/wvanes/.ICEauthority
A restart didnot, much to my annoyance, have ant positive effect.
Hope you can help me along with this problem.

/etc/fstab is the file that mounts the filesystems at boot. You may or may not be mounting /home as a separate partition. Probably not, though, from the little you've posted.

Without the .ICEauthority file, you probably won't be able to log on. Removing it is not the solution to your problem. There are multiple ways to solve your problem, among them deleting the user, and adding another, with the same name if you want. You have to be root to do this. Can you log in as root? /home/username/, where username would be replaced by your username, should be owned by the user, not by root. The command chown, as root, will do that. You really need to do some reading on your own to learn some basic Linux information. Blindly following advice from random internet posters won't teach you much. Learn to use Google, and to use the man pages. Those are far more likely to teach you what you need to know. You didn't learn everything you know about Windows in a few days, I suspect you've spent years learning that, and you will need to spend a little time learning Linux. There are no good shortcuts.

Putting ".iceauthority linux" into Google will get you started, and turn up lots and lots of discussions of how to deal with it.

Thanks for the lecture. I am used to Windows with its never ending problems. Thought Linux swould be the answer to that, but as it seems, I have to start here from scratch as well.
I will strugle on. Thank you for your advice. I consider this item closed, however but not solved.
Regards,
wvanes