You'll need to have Apache's mod_rewrite compiled into your Apache Web Server and you'll need to have access to setting some options up in your httpd.conf or at least have a server admin who's willing to do it for you. You can follow my tutorial for installing Apache web server on Linux here. For quick reference, the configure options for mod_rewrite are:

./configure
--enable-module=rewrite
--enable-shared=rewrite

I strongly urge you to carefully consider what other options you need to compile into your Apache installation. The above example is only for this one module.

Once you've compiled Apache to use mod_rewrite, you will need to setup the httpd.conf file. Here's how I set mine up for this particular situtation.