Installing themes automatically (with or without FTP)

Last year I installed WordPress on my own LAMP server with Ubuntu. Everything worked perfectly, including when I installed themes using the GUI; when I clicked “Install Theme”, it did just that, and it didn’t ask me for anything.

Now, on this Fedora box, it always asks me to enter FTP credentials when trying to install themes. I’m unfamiliar with configuring FTP, as I’m a fairly new Linux user. When I enter what I think are the correct credentials (tried ftp user, root, local user), it tells me the connection failed. I’ve installed vsftpd through yum along with the GUI component (system-config-vsftpd), and still couldn’t figure out how to make it work. Would SELinux cause this?

I’ve looked all over and, while I’ve found several responses regarding this issue, no solutions seemed to help (added localhost to hosts file, used localhost as server name, etc.)

Any help would be appreciated ??