(Not sure if this belongs here or on webmasters; please move if necessary.)

I'm a total newbie to Cake and not much better with apache; I've done a lot of PHP but always with a server that's already been set up by someone else. So I'm going through the basic blog tutorial, and it says:

A Note On mod_rewrite Occasionally a new user will run in to mod_rewrite issues, so I'll mention them marginally here. If the Cake welcome page looks a little funny (no images or css styles), it probably means mod_rewrite isn't functioning on your system. Here are some tips to help get you up and running:

Make sure that an .htaccess override is allowed: in your httpd.conf, you should have a section that defines a section for each Directory on your server. Make sure the AllowOverride is set to All for the correct Directory.

Make sure you are editing the system httpd.conf rather than a user- or site-specific httpd.conf.

For some reason or another, you might have obtained a copy of CakePHP without the needed .htaccess files. This sometimes happens because some operating systems treat files that start with '.' as hidden, and don't copy them. Make sure your copy of CakePHP is from the downloads section of the site or our SVN repository.

Make sure you are loading up mod_rewrite correctly! You should see something like LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/httpd/mod_rewrite.so and AddModule mod_rewrite.c in your httpd.conf."

I'm using XAMPP on linux. I've found my httpd.conf file in opt/lampp/ etc, but am not sure what I need to do with it. I've searched for "rewrite", and there's only one line:

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

There's nothing about AddModule mod_rewrite.c.

Do I just create a Directory section for the directory I've installed Cake in and set AlllowOverride to All? (I created a separate subdirectory of my wwwroot and installed in there, since I also have installs of Joomla and CodeIgniter.) Is there anything else I need to do? My download of Cake did come with two htaccess-type files (._.htaccess and .htaccess) - do I need to do anything with them?

Thanks for any help you can provide to this non-server-admin.

EDIT TO ADD virtual host sample:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin [email protected]
    DocumentRoot /www/docs/dummy-host.example.com
    ServerName dummy-host.example.com
    ServerAlias www.dummy-host.example.com
    ErrorLog logs/dummy-host.example.com-error_log
    CustomLog logs/dummy-host.example.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>