Well, installing WordPress wasn’t quite hasslefree, but might be a bad debian package I used.
I had problems with uploading pictures, getting the dreaded “Is its parent directory writable by the server?” error. This turned out to be a directory which did not have proper permissions; /srv/www, in fact.
So, I ran
sudo chown o+rx /srv/www
Which allowed me to upload the images, but now another problem. The images were not showing up. This turned out to be due to a missing symlink in /usr/share/wordpress to /srv/www/wp-uploads/blog.metapathy.com.
Right! So, I added the symlink by running
ln -s /srv/www/wp-uploads/blog.metapathy.com /usr/share/wordpress/wp-uploads
and that would be that, you’d think. But, no, they still weren’t working! Now apache was getting mad and forbidding me to access it, so I started looking at what I had done with my apache configuration (I had been following this guide). Turns out I needed to use Options +FollowSymLinks rather than merely Options FollowSymLinks.
And now it finally seems to be working properly. 