I am a 11-hour veteran of Tomcat 6.
As a 40-minute veteran, I had a problem with this too, due to a misreading of the Tomcat default home page.
"This is the default Tomcat home page. It can be found on the local filesystem at: /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/ROOT/index.html
Tomcat6 veterans might be pleased to learn that this system instance of Tomcat is installed with CATALINA_HOME in /usr/share/tomcat6 and CATALINA_BASE in /var/lib/tomcat6, following the rules from /usr/share/doc/tomcat6-common/RUNNING.txt.gz."
By inspection, I found a copy of the index.html at /usr/share/tomcat/webapps/default-root/index.html. I therefore built the deployment hierarchy in /usr/share/tomcat/webapps/ rather than in /var/lib//tomcat/webapps. Once I copied the directory from/usr/share/tomcat/webapps/ to /var/lib//tomcat/webapps, everything worked.
Just in case anyone out there is as careless as me...
Regards,
SK.