Home directory changed, nautilus messed up(won't login)

[macktruck]

How do I change it back? I can't login to either GNOME or KDE so I'm in a bit of a bind. Incase you're wondering, I changed it out of frustration to a folder for FTP..I made another account but it kept giving me 550 and 553 errors so I made a foolish mistake, as you can see. Feel like crap about it now.

Please help me

[jpollard]

Try logging in as root in a console terminal window.

Then add a new user (temporarily) just to verify that everything is working - you should
be able to login as that new user.

Once that is verified you can start checking the login with the problem -

ls -lZ /home/tmplogin - gives the security context of a working home login

With that you can fix the user login using chcon if the SELinux label has changed.
It also provides the access modes for the home directory (changeable with chmod)
in case they have been altered.

You can also verify that the home directory in the /etc/passwd file match what the
home directory is. The path should be the same.

The worst case, last ditch thing that can fix it is to rename the /home/loginname
directory to something else. Try to login - I believe it will create the home directory
on an attempt. If it doesn't, you can remove the /etc/passwd entry (see the userdel
command) and recreate it (using useradd). Note, userdel can remove the users email
files, which is not usually saved anyway.

Once logins for the account are working you can then move/copy files from the
renamed home directory (do this as the user).

Other things may prevent this from working - such as an unlabelled mount of /home..
That can be corrected (after the mount) by

1. unmount the /home filesystem
2. use "ls -lZ /home" to get the required directory security context
3. mount the /home filesystem
4.use "chcon" to set the require directory security context.

Or you could just "touch /.autorelabel" and reboot.

[macktruck]

Thank you very much for that, but I ingeniously, with my unprecedented mind, and vastly superior intelligence set the home folder in /etc rather than the original /home folder..It was a long night, I was already having problems with it in /var/www/html(was using this for the ftp, testing grounds for a website as you can guess) then I clumsily typed /etc/home/(username here). Man, I hadn't used linux in a while and I wasn't very good with it to begin with.

You gave me an epiphany though, figured out how to boot in command line so I temporarily chmoded /etc/ to 777 and after it's fixed I'm chmodding it back to it's original shape.

Still can't believe I did something so stupid...Thank you so much though I'm so brain dead today from the forsaken pollen allergies that I don't think I would've thought of chmodding if it wasn't for you mentioning chcon'ing