page permalinks not working

Hey all,

I’m running wordpress locally on 127.0.0.1 on mac osx lion. All links work fine. Problem is when I add pages, and set permalinks to the page, and then associate the page with one of my template themes, as shown in this link below:

http://i49.tinypic.com/xdfjfp.jpg

I get this:

Not Found
The requested URL /gps-products was not found on this server.

So I looked at documentation:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_The_Site_URL

And it speaks of modifying the .htaccess file. However, there is no .htacess file that came with my installation:

find . -type f -name ‘.htaccess’ produces nothing

Also note that when going to settings > permalinks, it says this:

If your .htaccess file were writable, we could do this automatically, but it isn’t so these are the mod_rewrite rules you should have in your .htaccess file. Click in the field and press CTRL + a to select all.

So I follow those instructions. I added the .htaccess, copied the code it told me to, restarted apache, and still get the 404 not found.

thanks for response