Well I got some of the site updates I wanted to do. There are still more content and style updates I need to do. But I did get WordPress moved to the root of the domain, which was super simple. I followed this tutorial and got it done in five minutes.
I also got pretty permalinks working, which took me a while because I wasn’t reading the instructions correctly. But that’s all working now. If you have mod_rewrite enabled in Apache edit your site configuration file under apache2/sites-available (at least that’s how apache is setup on my box). And place the following config in any relevant <Directory> tags.
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Then all you should need to do is log into WordPress and choose your pretty permalink style from the ‘Permalinks’ section in ‘Settings’.
If you don’t have mod_rewrite enabled, on Ubuntu you can enable it with this:
$ sudo a2enmod rewrite
$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
To disable, use the a2dismod command instead. Thanks to this guy for those commands.