Unable to get /%postname%/ permalinks working, 404 on all links

Question

I have only pages, no posts as links. It's just a mock site at the moment.

I used a particular theme, set it to "Post name" permalink, and the links worked fine.

But then I changed to another theme (I think that's the only change I made), but the links don't seem to work anymore - it gives 404 errors.

Switching back to the first theme didn't help. Only Plain permalinks works.

This is on a Linode Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS machine which has other Wordpress blogs running with a similar setup, but face no issue. Tried switching back and forth between the "Plain" and "Post name" mode - but no luck.

The httpd.conf looks like:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAlias www.myexamplesite.com myexamplesite.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/myexamplesite.com
ServerName www.myexamplesite.com

<Directory /var/www/html/myexamplesite.com>
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
AllowOverride ALL
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Answer 1

This is going to sound crazy, but the following worked... I put the content in the following directory:

/var/www/myexamplesite.com/public_html (and created log/ as well)

Along with the following entry in httpd.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAlias www.myexamplesite.com myexamplesite.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/myexamplesite.com/public_html
ServerName www.myexamplesite.com

# Log file locations
LogLevel warn
ErrorLog  /var/www/myexamplesite.com/log/error.log
CustomLog /var/www/myexamplesite.com/log/access.log combined

<Directory /var/www/myexamplesite.com/public_html>

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

</Directory>

</VirtualHost>

That's it!