Welp, finally got “Clean URLs” to work on Drupal.
Other than a lot of STFW-ing and swearing, this is what it took…
Please note that my linux box is running a SuSE 9.1 pro install with Apache2.
First, create a directory structure off of your Drupal root like so:
$ cd $DRUPAL_HOME
$ mkdir system
$ mkdir system/test
Second, modify either your httpd.conf or httpd.conf.local thusly:
<Directory $DRUPAL_HOME>
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
Third, from the command line or webmin, restart your Apache daemon (remember, this is SuSE 9.1, so ymmv):
$ httpd-prefork -k restart
Forth, from your web browser, navigate to http://yoursite/?q=admin/settings, “Enable Clean URLs”, and save your changes.
Worked for me!