Can't run Tomcat from Intellij Idea

In my case, creating a soft link and changing the access permission solved the problem

    cd /usr/share/tomcat7
    ln -s /etc/tomcat7 conf
    chmod -R 655 /etc/tomcat7/

I have replied to the similar question here

The problem is that the layout is as they call "non-standard"

The problem has been marked as solved here: IntelliJ needs to copy tomcat conf dir to project directory

Note that Tomcat installed using the package manager on some Linux systems has non-standard layout and permissions, and therefore will not work with IDEA.