[Mediawiki-l] Difficulty with changing the alias in Ubuntu 10.04 with mediawiki

[Vincent Baier (RIT Student)]

Hi Everybody,

I have been trying to use the pre-packaged installs for mediawiki on my new
ubuntu server and I wanted to abstract away my URL and make it something
more along the lines of /something_descriptive/page rather than
/mediawiki/page. In my previous uses of mediawiki I could do this with a
simple alias; however, the new packages for lucid do not seem to play well
with this. I installed the lamp-server^ and mediawiki packages via apt-get
and have standard configurations. The server without modifiction works fine.
But if I change the Alias statement in /etc/mediawiki/apache.conf it breaks
terribly. For some reason, adding a second Alias statement at the end of my
/etc/apcahe2/apache.conf file will work; however, once the page loads the
displayed URL is still the old style, that is
"/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page". I suspect the spaghetti mess of symbolic
links in this package is making something go awry. I have tried modifying
the following settings in /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php:

$wqArticlePath
$wgScriptPath
$wgUsePathInfo

The results of various modifications of these have either been a seemingly
working redirect from apache to a blank page with now source. Or a redirect
loop warning. If anybody could help me get these URLs cleaned up I would
really appreciate it. Also, I have been trying to find this for some time,
but is there any place where the ubuntu packages are ACTUALLY documented?
They rarely follow the standard configuration of what they contain (apache,
mysql, etc) and the absurd number of symbolic links in many of them makes
their folder structure almost impossible to navigate around and determine
which files correspond to the original configuration files of the software.
Some package specific documentation resources would really help.

Thanks guys.