Permissions Problem, Uploading etc

Hi I am running CentOS and apache2 and found I was not able to install plugins the way I had my file ownership. So I changed the ownership on all the files and directories to apache.apache . This probably is not secure but at least I can upload plugins.

Still I cannot edit CSS files from the backend. The changes don’t save. My permissions for style.css I changed permissions to 777 for that file. It then seemed to update through the backend editor but when I look at the file using vi it actually has not updated.

Can someone point me in the right direction to getting a correctly set up installation? Its easy on shared servers but because I set up this server myself its not so clear what is wrong.