It would seem your permissions and / or ownership on /usr/share/wordpress/ could be wrong. Try setting this directory to 777 and CHOWN the owner to Apache (on Ubuntu it runs as user www-data).
If WordPress was unzipped/expanded in /usr/share/wordpress you would have a folder wp-content – and the /uploads folder should be created in there (assuming permissions etc are right).
You also mention /srv/www/wp-uploads/localhost/ and /srv/www/localhost/ — so maybe you were changing your VHOST files too? Have you enabled mod-rewrite or anything different?