[luau] Basic help

[Alvin Murphy]

I am a little embarrassed to show my ignorance, but here goes. In the 
midst of trying to recover from a mess of my Mandrake 8.1 because of 
problems installing and uninstalling Win4Lin, I ran out of room on 
/home/alvin. I was able to move some files to "trash" but some would 
not, for instance the huge file "install" created by OpenOffice. 
Nautilus tells me I cannot move or delete the directory because it does 
not belong to me, it belongs to root. I went to a terminal and changed 
to supervisor-root, but that made no difference. I wrote "chmod a+rwx 
/home/alvin/install" but that made no difference. Can anyone tell me 
what I need to do? Also some files that I was able to move to trash, 
same problem in that I cannot empty trash because I am not owner. I also 
do not know where "trash" is so cannot reach it from terminal. Thanks.