Setting up "pretty" urls

I am attempting to fix our urls to not include the PATHINFO in all of them. I’ve read the documentation on the support page about permalinks and searched through the forums about this problem.

To solve it I can tell you several things:

1. We are running apache2 with the mod_rewrite module in place
2. I’ve introduced the following code to the .htaccess file on the server:

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

3. We cycled the apache2 service on the server to have the changes to .htaccess take effect

Despite all of this the permalinks refuse to allow me to remove the PATHINFO thing which is forcing index.php into all of my urls.

Did I miss a step? Is there something fundamental about this whole thing that I’m just not getting?

— John