permissions of my /home/"user" directory error
 

I don't know when it happened but suddenly I don't have permissions in my /home directory anymore. If I make a directory for example I get a permission denied message and firefox can't download any files in there anymore. How do I fix it?

You shouldn't have write permission in /home, nor should it be owned by a user.
Your $HOME directory should be /home/philip, unless philip is the only user who will ever use this machine.

"chmod 755 /home" sets the typical permissions
"chown root.root /home" sets the typical ownership

Uhm I don't know what you mean exactly. If I do ls -l /home I get my user folder which is philip. If I do ls -l /home/philip I get the list of the contents of my home directory and it's about the directory itself. I wanted to show the permissions so that's why I posted that way

The problem is I think my permissions are OK and I didn't edit the fstab file but I can't create anything in my own home directory.

Not exactly related but you can use the -d option of ls if you want ls to show the directory instead of showing it's contents.

Are you sure your uid is 500?

Try "/dev/hdb5 /home ext3 defaults 0 0" in your /etc/fstab.
/home should be mounted every time you boot your linux, so you don't need "user" option. "defaults" implies "exec" option.

Also, this is not right:
user/group = 500/500 instead of philip/philip means thay your user/group id is not 500/500, /home/philip is not yours!

Did you delete the user philip be4 but did not remove the home directory? Or did you change the output to 500 on purpose?

Ok that's the error. How do I change the group of a directory?

chown philip:philip /home/philip

If your username is "philip" and group name is "users", you can do, as root:
chown philip.users /home/philip

If there is a permissions issue with subdirectories of /home/philip, you can do it recursively:
chown -R philip.users /home/philip/

Thanks!