I installed Joomla today, and it went smoothly except that under Help -> System Info in the Joomla admin panel, all "Directory Permissions" are "Unwritable."

I've read up on various solutions, such as installing suphp to take care of user permissions. But if I have my own Linux VPS and I am the only user (i.e. noone else has accounts on my VPS), what is the easiest way to fix this issue? Can I just CHMOD those directories to 777 without worrying about causing a security issue? Or is there a similarly easy solution for someone like me with very basic Linux knowledge?