Broken Pipe Error Message

[Gary Waters]

Good day everyone,

First, as always, I issue my newbie preamble. I hereby declare that I'm 
very green in Linux, etc...

I logged into my user account and opened up a konsole and went into 
text-mode setup to changed my firewall settings. I typed:

su root
then typed my password
then typed setup

Once I enter text mode I get a broken pipe error. I therefore cannot get 
into the firewall settings. If I reboot the machine and try again 
everything works fine until I try a second time. Then the broken pipe error 
message once again appears and I cannot use text-mode setup. This is on my 
home machine. I forgot to look to see if there was spefic information after 
the broken pipe error before I left for work. The error does not occur in 
root to my knowledge.

I also had an "octet-stream missing error," which was solved by googling 
for a solution. The broken pipe information I found was a bit too vague, 
which is why I'm posting to the list. I would greatly appreciate any clues 
that would point me in the right direction towards a solution.

Thank you!

Gary