Magento URLs other than home page do not work without index.php

Question

My magento is installed on Ubuntu Linux under /var/www/magento . This question looks like some of the questions in the archives but is acutally somewhat different. When I in

Answer 1

Within the Magento configuration (accessed in the Magento Admin Panel through System > Configuration) there are some relevant settings that determine what the eventual Search Engine Friendly URL looks like.

Web > Search Engine Optimization > Use Web Server Rewrites

A setting which should always be turned on. If not "/index.php/" will be added to URL which is unnecessary and looks ugly. To enable this option, you also need Apache mod_rewrite enabled in your hosting environment.

Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations > Product URL Suffix

The default value here is ".html" which will be appended to each product URL. Some SEO-experts claim this is needed for better rating, other SEO-exports say it is not. For our MageBridge integration with Joomla! this setting needs to be empty.

Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations > Category URL Suffix

The same as above, but now categories.

Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations > Use categories path for product URLs

With this option enabled, the product URL will also include the category URL Keys. While it could be argued this causes duplicate content, product pages might also benefit from this because they become part of a bigger structure.

Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations > Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products

If you are really worried about duplicate content (which is not as bad as some people will tell you), then you can enable the canonical tag which tells search engines which page is leading once duplicate content has been detected.

Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations > Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories

The same as above, but for categories.

further reading on the matter http://www.yireo.com/tutorials/magento/magento-administration/664-fixing-url-rewrites-with-magento