will mod_rewrite work with temp urls???

[eluser]charlie spider[/eluser]
i am doing a redesign for a small business's website
their existing hosting company charges WAY too much money
so we have set up an account with a new hosting company
i have built many CodeIgniter websites that are running on this same company's servers, and they all have the index.php removed with no problems.

we have not changed the DNS settings for this website yet, so the domain name still points to the old server.

the new website works fine on my localhost and i have uploaded it to the new server, but i can not get the htaccess file to work properly.

the server ( shared ip ) is set up as follows:

Code:

+ home   // our base folder
      + Code_Igniter_1.6.2   // removed from web root
      + public_html         // web root
            + application
            + images
            + javascript
            + stylesheets
            - .htaccess
            - index.php

i have set the following:

Code:

$config['index_page'] = "";
$config['uri_protocol']    = "AUTO";

and have tried both:

Code:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

and:

Code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|javascript|style|favicon\.ico)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

and have also tried the above with:

Code:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /public_html/index.php/$1 [L]

i also use base_url() when generating any links.

Now because the site has not had the DNS settings changed, to access the site on the new server i have to use an ip address that is like:

http://123.45.67.89/~directory/

and not simply: http://www.thesite.com

however, i can't get any pages to come up properly unless i explicitly add index.php to the url's

can mod_rewrite work when using a temporary url such as: http://123.45.67.89/~directory/

or do i just go ahead with changing the DNS and hoe that everything is working properly ?

anyone been in this situation before ?

any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks