I have Apache set up and mostly working. The DocumentRoot is /var/www, and this directory contains a number of subdirectories. I can view the files and directory indices (when there are no default pages) in all of those subdirectories except one: "images". Its permissions and ownership are identical to the other subdirectories of /var/www, but when I try to access it (or its files) I get 403 Forbidden. What other things should I check?

the permissions should be set to 755 if you want anyone to access and see them. double check that you have

owner set to rwx, user set to r-x and other set to r-x or

drwxr-xr-x

the d = directory, also verify that all of the files and subdirectories in that directory are also set to rwxr-xr-x this will give the owner full access, and everyone else will be able to read or execute the program/file/document/picture/what_ever.

to do so as owner or as root you need to type:

chmod -R 755 /path/to/modify

the -R is the recursive for chmod, unless you have already made a user for apache other then root, you will have to be root to do this as root will own everything in the /var/www subdirectory.

Here are the permissions for every directory down to the ones I'm having problems with:
/var 755 owner: root
/var/www 755 owner: www-data
/var/www/html 755 owner: www-data
/var/www/html/images 755 owner: www-data
/var/www/html/funny 755 owner: www-data

DocumentRoot is /var/www/html
Apache is running as www-data

I can access http://localhost/index.shtml and the other files in the DocumentRoot. I can also access files in all of the subdirectories of the DocumentRoot except /images. I can get http://localhost/funny/quotes.shtml, but http://localhost/images/ gives me 403 Forbidden, and http://localhost/images/any-file-in-here gives me 404 Not Found, apparently because it can't navigate into that directory.

The problem is that the inability to navigate into http://localhost/images/ makes no sense, because it has the same permissions exactly as http://localhost/funny/ and that last one works fine.

I've figured it out. I looked at the error log after trying to access an image, and found that the config file has /images set as an alias to /usr/share/images......I guess I didn't look over all the default stuff thoroughly enough to notice that before.

look through the Apache configuration files for an alias. I had the same problem recently - it was Apache filtering the content, not the OS. Well, so at least its a possibility.

Edit - lol -jinx-

good find.