Path to Assets

I'm not sure what we are doing wrong but I cannot pull any images, css or js from the directories I have created in the MVC directory

/main
/mvc
/mvc/images
/mvc/js
/system

If I link them directly <img src="http://ip_address/~sandbox/images/home.png">
Nothing

$this->load->helper('url');
echo "<img src=".base_url('images/home.png').">";

doesn't work either but it does echo the html <img src="http://ip_address/~sandbox/images/home.png">

It appears the helper('url') method is working correctly but still cant see the image its pulling.

Is there something we missed in configuration? Something thats not in .htaccess we need?

Fresh install of CI 3 on SUSE12 with Oracle 11g.