icymidnight

I ran into the same problem. On my fedora server, as root, I ran
yum install gd-devel php-gd
The exact command to run would depend on your server, i.e. using apt-get.

The plugin requires ftp access to adjust file permissions so that the upgrade can actually go through (by default your webserver may not be allowed to change files).

I would like to set my installation to do the upgrade without FTP. I’ve tried temporarily setting the permissions of the wordpress directory (and sub-directories) open to everyone, but that doesn’t work.

Any help on what I’d need to set up would be appreciated.

I came back to this post, and just realised that I didn’t post my latest findings. The problem for me was SELinux. SELinux has its’ own set of file access permissions, and restricts the web server process from accessing files outside of the document root. When I transferred the tarball into my home directory and extracted it there, then copied the WordPress directory to my document root, the files carried the SELinux permissions that don’t allow them to be read by the web server process. Your two options are to download the tarball direcly to your website directory structure, or reset the SELinux permissions when you copy them from elsewhere on the server.

I installed Fedora Core on a virtual machine to see if a brand new OS would run WP and not surprisingly, it ran without a hitch. I reinstalled the OS on my server, figuring I must have screwed up some obscure setting somewhere and I only use it for a web server so no biggy. Well after the reinstall, I still couldn’t get WP to run. Argh! Then I noticed that I installed it on my virtual machine by wgetting the tarball directly to the html directory and extracting. Did the same thing on my web server and bam! blog works. It appears to me that the file permissions are all the same so I have no idea why this started working all of a sudden. Any suggestions?

Anyway, I marking it as resolved and hope that someone who runs into the same problem will find this useful one day.

So I’ve continued trying to figure this out and I’m stuck. Any help would be appreciated.
I know php is installed because I can get to php pages on my server https://www.icymidnight.com/blog/helloworld.php
I can’t get to the WP files though https://www.icymidnight.com/blog/index.php which have a different error message than files that do not exist https://www.icymidnight.com/blog/not_here.php

Thanks for your time.