hey,
my school uses fedora core 3. My friend and I want to give each other access to our home directories, but don't know how. We can't set group permissions, because that would mean our whole class would have access. Does anyone know how to give one user permission to one directory (in fedora core 3)?

to read about permissions in linux, read this .
however, i think what you are trying to do would require some sort of administrative privledges (ie root) and therefore wouldnt be possible.

As a moderately experienced linux user, I knew about the basic permissions (owner, group, other). Normally, I would create a group called "MyFriends", add myself, and my friends to this list, and give that group permissions to the files. The problem is only root can create a group!

I was thinking for a while, and found a possible workaround. I somehow set the folder as a shared folder, and place a .htaccess in the folder, which forces a password to be entered. I could simply give my friends this password. The problem is I would probably have to start an apache or other server. This also usually requires root.

I wouldn't expect it to be this hard to share just one folder with just one other user, and I wouldn't expect it to require root privileges. Am I missing something?