the LYNCH report

With the recent changes to the Dashboard feature of wordpress.com’s hosted blogs, users with Linux running on an AMD 64 based machine may be out of luck in trying to upload photos, music, videos or anything else. It appears a newer version of java is required, and the java plug in required to upload media is incompatible with the 64 bit architecture.

Here’s a workaround:

This is how the error manifests itself:

As you can see, there is no upload button, and once you’ve selected a file to upload, the upload box will simply hang until you close it. Here’s what the upload box should look like:

To get around this bug, install the beta version of Firefox 3 – Ubuntu users can find it in Synaptic Package Manager via the Universe repository. Here’s a screen shot:

Once you have Firefox 3.0 installed, make sure you’ve closed all instances of Firefox, then open Firefox 3.0 (which should appear in the Internet section of the Main Menu if you’ve used Synaptic). You’ll now be able to upload media to your wordpress.com blog (however you won’t be able to access some features (such as the graphs which depict your site’s traffic), since Firefox 3.0 beta does not come with any java/flash whatsoever. Therefore, once you’ve uploaded all your media, save or publish your post, then shut down all instances of Firefox and revert back to your normal version of Firefox (non-3.0) if you want to access any of the java/flash features).

If you run into any problems, feel free to post a comment.