500625 Magento Fix Needed

I've installed a fresh copy of Magento on a domain name with no addons. It's installed ok after a manual fix to [login to view URL] to point to the /var/tmp folder however now when I upload images to a product i get permission denied error. I can manually fix this by chown and chgrp and 777 permission every folder/file in the image path but the image does not show on the front end and not a fix to the problem. So the following needs to be fixed.. 1) Fix error message when uploading images to a product 2) Add 1 category with 1 product and make it show on the front end with multiple images. Easy for an expert. Thanks