rverduzco

Same problem here.

I’m running a fresh install of ubuntu server 8.10 with all the security updates as of today, WordPress 2.7.1, PHP Version 5.2.6-2ubuntu4.1, Apache/2.2.9 (Ubuntu), and MySQL 5.0.6

Although WP is able to write to the .htaccess file, permalinks still do not work.

Obviously, I double checked that Apache had the mod_rewrite module enabled and had it restarted after each permalink modification. Also, I have the AllowOverride directive set to “all” for the / directory in my security file of Apache configuration. This security file is separated from httpd.conf in Debian based Apache Servers, and in fact, the httpd.conf file is blank, as it is replaced by apache2.conf

So, it seems that Apache is not the culprit of this, php doesn’t look like a candidate to cause the failure nor MySQL does. As .htaccess is a file that Apache reads to change the URL, it could be that Apache is the problem, but I don’t experience this issue when I use an .htaccess file outside the wordpress context, for instance, in a different subfolder of www/

Any ideas?

It worked for me, after trying all the solutions proposed in the documentation.

Based on your solution, I tried putting something else before the variables, with and without the .php extension, but that did not worked. It looked like:
/site.php/%postname%/
and
/site/%postname%/

The only custom permalink that worked for me was the ones that had a similar structure to what you proposed:
/index.php/% wordpress-permalink-variables %/

Does anyone know the reason why permalinks brake even though the suggested configuration is folowed?

Thanks for your solution.