Getting mod_rewrite to work on Ubuntu

Why, o why, is such a simple task so damn hard to accomplish?

First off, some retard on debian decided to split up the httpd.conf into thousands of little shards. It might be a good software engineering decision but it's only warranted when the config file grows large. For the default install on _any_ machine, there is no reason on earth why you should do that. Perhaps ubuntu or debian server installs can have that as the default, but why do that for a desktop install? Beats me.

Here are the steps you need to take:

1. add soft-links for rewrite.load and rewrite.conf within the mods-enabled/ subdirectory.
2. edit sites-available/default and make sure you set AllowOverride All for "/" and the DocumentRoot directories
3. make sure you add the RewriteEngine and RewriteRule commands within the damn VirtualHost block
   

Of course, all of this is logical - but only when you have understood it. Why the fuck do they have to build a virtual host container right from the word go? Unless you understand what virtual hosts are, you'd never figure out that you need to make those settings inside each virtual host in order for them to take effect.