having trouble with wordpress pretty permalinks

I feel like I have read every blog or post on this topic but there are so many out there... I still seem to be missing SOMETHING.I don't know what. My site is hosted on Amazon EC2.

My mod rewrite module is definitely working. I used to have the following in my .htaccess to no avail:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Then, I did "chmod -v 666 .htaccess" to make sure Wordpress could accesss it.

My /etc/apache2/sites-available/default looks like this

DocumentRoot /var/www
    <Directory />
            Options FollowSymLinks
            # AllowOverride FileInfo
    </Directory>
    <Directory /var/www/>
            Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
            # AllowOverride FileInfo
            Order allow,deny
            allow from all
    </Directory>

And my /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default looks like this, due to the advice of another thread

    <Directory />
            Options FollowSymLinks
            # AllowOverride FileInfo
    </Directory>
    <Directory /var/www/>
            Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
            # AllowOverride FileInfo
            Order allow,deny
 开发者_如何学Python           allow from all
    </Directory>

When I restarted Apache, all the text listed above in my .htaccess disappeared and pretty permalinks still do not work. Any one know what I should do next????

In your Apache conf, you need to enable the .htaccess files:

AllowOverride All

Probably you did, but didn't mention so I ask to make sure.. Did you set your desired permalink structure in wp admin? Settings -> Permalinks? I suggest to try Custom structure like /%category%/%postname%/ or /%postname%/