Hello all,

I have recently installed Red Hat 8 on a seperate partition on my new laptop (along with XP). I'm fairly new to Linux but I know a bit.

Everything was going fine until a few days ago when I started getting 'Unknown Error' messages when trying to launch programs from the System Tools, System Settings and Server Settings menus (in KDE). Everything else seems to be fine and I can mostly carry on my work as normal.

One thing I did which may have caused a problem is that I was logged in as root and accidently did a chmod o+w * -R in the / directory. I stopped the command but it had already got through the bin, boot, dev and etc directories. I don't know if this would cause a problem. I reversed the changes on all the programs in the bin directory and on the other directories themselves but I dont really know what effect that will have.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

your log files should give you some info on the problem.

Also, some of the /dev files will probably need to be world writable.

Hi, thanks for replying,

I looked in /etc/log/messages but there are no entries for when the error shows. Is this where I should be looking? The System Logs GUI tool is giving the 'Unknown Error' problem so I can't look there.

I set all in /dev to world writable but it makes no difference.

Also just remembered another problem that appeared at the same time - I can't shut down the computer from the login screen anymore, it goes to the black screen like its going to do it but then goes back to the login screen. I have to go back into Windows to shut it down.