Hey... I've asked around on this one and am coming up short on answers for this

I have default permissions set on /var/www/ (root:root 755)
I install Joomla 2.5.6

Initially I cant delete the 'installation' folder through the web page, I went around this by deleting the folder manually. I went to install a few plugins/templates (k2, widgetkit, etc) and it refused to install the template with the error "unable to move file".
I change permissions to apache:apache 775 recursively to everything in and inclusive of /var/www/html/. From my experience this is not normal, so I already know something isn't right. This works but joomla eventually crashes to the point that I have to completely blow everything out in /var/www/html/ and reinstall joomla from scratch, repeating the aforementioned hacks.

Centos 5.8
Joomla 2.5.6
Apache 2.2.3
PHP 5.3.3
MYSQL 5.0.95

I'm almost 100% sure the permissions are hosed... Anyone have any idea why the permissions are fouled up?

Hi,

The permissions look ok, but since it's a Centos box, I guess it's SELinux that is the problem.

Regards

Bathory....

Unfortunately that's the first thing I tried. I've been poking around and found several other problems as well, so I'm guessing SELinux hosed something even though I disabled it at install, or the install was generally hosed from the get go. Considering that at one point the symlinks in the kde menu didn't work (any of them), suddenly decided to work after a reboot, then vnc gook a giant dump in my lap while i was in the middle of compiling something, I'm guessing that the whole OS was hosed from day one . I'll repost after I reload it all and it's back working... I hope :/

Assuming that it's SELinux which is causing the permissions problems. First reset the security contexts using restorecon
Then disable Selinux, by changing /etc/selinux/config or by temporarily disabling selinux by

OS reload was a waste of time....It's actually worse now. SELinux is hard disabled, firewall is outright off, tried normal permissions, tried apache:apache 777 recursive, tried the restorecon trick that rch mentioned... looked left... looked right... went straBRICKWALL!!!!....

I honestly don't know what I did wrong at this point..... Why do I now find myself pining for the days of writing web pages in vi and notepad....? :P

Output of /var/log/httpd/error_log?