I am using Suse 8.2.
I was trying to change the permisions of a directory and I made a big mistake, I typed :-
chown <owner>:<group> /<directory> -R

as root and it seemed to change the permissions of everything.
Now I can not log on, the error message is in part:-
/proc not mounted, failed to mount read only system.
I can see everything using knoppix so I guess it should be possible to fix it, but how ??

Hehe, I did the same a couple of weeks ago.

You must feel very stupid. I did. But there is a solution.

You have to start small. First let yourself back into linux.

I use RedHat, so I won't give just the accurate solution, just the steps you must take to get in. There is a way that you can get into linux as a single user that has all the permissions. You have to check how for Suse. But it will have to do something with changing kernel parameters in boot loader.

This is what you should do:

At lilo prompt type boot image followed by 1. Should look like this:

linux 1

I hope this works. I don't use Suse, so you just have to try it to see.

Next thing is to change permissions back to what they should be and reboot. You will get error messages from files that have bad permissions and then change those as well. I myself still haven't fixed the X. But I'm getting to it slowly.

Well at least this will get you back into linux.

Unfortunately I do not have lilo I have grub.
But using knoppix I have half recovered my system.
There problems no sound, no kde and no internet.
When I try to log into kde I get :-
There was an error setting up interprocess communications for KDE.
The message returned by the system was :-
Could not read network communications list./home/david/.DCPServer_linux__10
Please check that the dcopserver program is running.
But I can use gnome.

Even better!

I have grub too. In the menu - I suppose you get to the grub menu - press 'a' I think, or the option that says kernel something. You should get a command line in which a command will also be written. Then type a space and "single". This means you should type " single". Be sure to type in the space. This will boot you in the single user mode and you will work from there.

Check this link out. It should give you all the info required. You will see which command "a" or "e" works for you in the grub menu list. Check the link below and use the information above to take this step, and you should be just fine.

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...ng-single.html