[TYPO3-linux] chgrp not permitted - what to do?

[wubbonius]

Hi,

I am a newbee to Typo3 but have been playing around awhile with the 
quickstart install and am impressed. The next step would be for me to 
install the dummy-pack and go from there. Everything seems going fine 
except after the untar the files I need to change the group to the one 
my webserver is using.
Finally I found this needs to be 'apache' (using debian 3.1; shared 
hosting) and try to chgrp; this is what I get (where the * is the wild 
card for all the files):

chgrp: changing group of `dummy-3.8.1/*': Operation not permitted

I tried using chown:

chown: changing ownership of `dummy-3.8.1/*': Operation not permitted

What can I do to make this install work (without chmod'ing all files to 
777!)

Thanks in advance.

Wubbonius