Not able to change my homepage.

Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.

Triple-click the line below to select it, then drag or copy the text — do not type it — into the Terminal window and press return:

ls -Oel Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist

Post any lines of output that appear below what you entered — the text, please, not a screenshot.

Back up all data.

Make a note of your Safari settings, then quit Safari.

In the Finder, select Go ▹ Go to Folder from the menu bar, copy the text on the line below into the box that opens, and press return:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist

A Finder window will open with a file selected. Move the selected file to the Desktop, leaving the window open. Relaunch Safari. Your settings will be reset to their defaults, including the home page, but your history and bookmarks will be preserved. Recreate the settings and test. If Safari now works, delete the file you moved to the Desktop.

Otherwise, quit Safari again and put the file back where it was, overwriting the newer one that was created in its place. Post your results.

Back up all data now.

This procedure will unlock all your user files (not system files) and reset their ownership and access-control lists to the default. If you've set special values for those attributes on any of your files, they will be reverted. In that case, either stop here, or be prepared to recreate the settings if necessary. If none of this is meaningful to you, you don't need to worry about it.

Step 1

Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.

Drag or copy — do not type — the following line into the Terminal window, then press return:

sudo chflags -R nouchg,nouappnd ~ $TMPDIR.. ; sudo chown -R $UID:20 ~ $_ ; chmod -R -N ~ $_ 2> /dev/null

Be sure to select the whole line by triple-clicking anywhere in it. You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up. You don't need to post the warning. If you don’t have a login password, you’ll need to set one before you can run the command.

The command will take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear, then quit Terminal.

Step 2

Boot into Recovery by holding down the key combination command-R at startup. Release the keys when you see a gray screen with a spinning dial.

When the OS X Utilities screen appears, select Utilities ▹ Terminal from the menu bar. A text window opens.

In the Terminal window, type this:

resetpassword

That's one word with no spaces. Then press return. A Reset Password window opens. You’re not going to reset a password.

Select your boot volume if not already selected.

Select your username from the menu labeled Select the user account if not already selected.

Under Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs, click the Reset button.

Select  ▹ Restart from the menu bar.

You almost certainly mistyped the command. People tend to type "reset password" or "restpassword" instead of "resetpassword".

Are you sure you were booted in Recovery mode? If you weren't, the command wouldn't be expected to work. If you were, you have a corrupt recovery partition, but that seems very unlikely to me.

There is no normal amount of time. It depends on how many files you have and how fast your system is. If it takes more than an hour, something is almost certainly wrong. In that case, just close the Terminal window. You'll be prompted to confirm.

If you're running 10.6.8, which I didn't know until now, then you couldn't possibly have gotten to step 2 as you wrote earlier, because there's no recovery partition in 10.6. Please clarify.

I'm still not sure I understand. Are you saying that the following never really happened?

Got to step 2 and put in resetpassword then pressed return and got the response "command not found".