Drupal Clean URLs on OS X Leopard

As said before, I did a Drupal installation according to the IBM tutorial and created my own 'drupal.development' virtual host. During the installation of Drupal I noticed I couldn't get Clean URLs. Now that I'm working on integrating Gallery2, I really needed them. So I had to look into the problem.

First I had to check if mod_rewrite was installed using 'apachectl -M'. This resulted in an error:

httpd: Syntax error on line 484 of /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf:
Syntax error on line 8 of /private/etc/apache2/other/+entropy-php.conf:
Cannot load /usr/local/php5/libphp5.so into server: dlopen(/usr/local/php5/libphp5.so, 10):
Symbol not found: _xmlTextReaderSchemaValidate\n
Referenced from: /usr/local/php5/libphp5.so\n Expected in: /usr/lib/libxml2.2.dylib\n

Using Apple's PHP5 configuration was no option, since I needed GD built in for Gallery2. So I hunted for libxml, but fortunately came across this: don't worry, apachectl screws up, just use PHP to check. I knew it was in there, so I had to look elsewhere.

Then I found that I needed to set the Directory permissions (AllowOverride) less restrictive in httpd.conf. I don't like doing that, (a) it's the original httpd.conf that might get overwritten during an update, (b) I don't like to mess with security and (c) I hate it when one site dictates the global settings. But it didn't work.

Then I read about changing the permissions in the vhost.conf. I did and it didn't work.

Finally I read about Drupal's .htaccess file. Someone said he couldn't find it and a default file was offered. I decided I might as well add it to my directory. It was only then that I noticed that I had renamed my .htaccess file to avoid running into 'access denied' trouble. After renaming it back everything worked. :-(