Made a local copy of live-site: all paths generate error 404
Fixed. It appeared that I installed the mod rewrite module, but didn't activate it in my default site profile (as per these instructions: http://www.seangw.com/wordpress/2012/01/how-to-enable-mod_rewrite-in-apache2-ubuntu/). Did that and everything works fine now. Woops, feel kind of stupid now.