This is using my tutorial right?
You followed step 22?
http://wiki.eqemulator.org/p?EQEmu_o...n_7_Virtualbox
I have it working with those steps, from start to end. I didn't need to chown the directory or anything., just chmod 777 (or 770 or whatever, 777 due to laziness and I never plan to forward port 80 so it's a LAN only accessible network spot).
TECHNICAL STUFF FOLLOWING
by default debian creates /var/www/ as the htdocs root default vhost entry.
This is set inside /etc/apache2/sites-available/default file.
files inside /var/www/ can be root and readable, since init.d for apache2 is ran as root and www-data (you can verify this by typing $ "ps aux | grep apache2" and note the left side for user executing the binaries.)