mod_rewrite not working

It looks like your site or virtual host has not been granted the appropriate permissions to process .htaccess files. You can test it easily by making a syntax error on purpose: if your site does not crash, the file is being ignored.

Try something like this in your main httpd.conf file:

<Directory "/path/to/your/site">
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

... or this (to your liking):

<VirtualHost *:80>
    AllowOverride All
</VirtualHost>

When I had this problem it turned out that the /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default had the AllowOverride All, but the /etc/apache2/apache2.conf also had the same entry for our web Directory with AllowOverwrite None. So be sure to check both places!