Yet Another Permalink Page not found Problem

Hi all,

I have been trying since I installed WordPress 4 months ago to get custom permalinks working. Now I’m trying to use BuddyPress Courseware to turn the website into a course site for my class, and I must solve this problem.

I am running

Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 11.10
Release: 11.10
Codename: oneiric

WordPress 3.3.1

Apache version 2.2.20

I’ve triple checked that mod_rewrite IS enabled.

My .htaccess file currently looks like

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php?error=404
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

My /etc/apache2/httpd.config contains
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>

I’ve also tried adding
Options +FollowSymlinks
to the top of my .htaccess
And /etc/apache2/sites-available/default
has AllowOverride All

Clearly the problem is that something misconfigured. I had originally installed the WP directory in /var/www/wordpress. Since then I aliased the site to something better and symlinked /var/www/wordpress to a special user account at /home/website/wordpress

I’m thinking that this might have effected me somehow because I’ve tried to follow all the other posts with no luck. I would also like to note that after I had to modify the site_url and site_home fields in the sql database to prevent the site from switching the url once someone hit a link. As a side effect this broke some links for images that were already uploaded.

Can someone please help me with this? I’ve ran out of ideas. But I know there is most likely something that needs to be updated.