Error Installing Solo Artist Bundle
Design and Skin Customization
It sounds like your hosting provider has made it so you cannot use symlinks, and has blocked the ability to change permissions (i.e. Apache is checking the permissions of all files/directories and will error if they are changed).
I'd recommend contacting your hosting provider and see if they can confirm, or if they have a setting you can change to get it working, since it should work on 755 as long as PHP is running as a CGI/FastCGI.
Hope this helps!