Somebody wrote an excellent post on how to make CakePHP work on LigHTTPD. It didn't work for me right away because for some reason mod_rewrite or my CakePHP settings are different from the "default" behavior.

Most blogs say that their URL arguments for non-tidy URLs are like this: /cakedir/index.php?url=pagename. However, for some reason my URLs are like this: /cakedir/index.php/pagename. I'm not sure why that is.

Nevertheless, you can follow the instructions in the blog post but if you have the same URL path rewrite setup as I do you will need to make a critical change to the url.rewrite-once statement:

#this is the original
   url.rewrite-once = (
    "^/(css|files|img|js|stats)/(.*)$" => "/$1/$2",
    "^/(.*)$" => "/index.php?url=$1"
   )

#change the index.php part
   url.rewrite-once = (
    "^/(css|files|img|js|stats)/(.*)$" => "/$1/$2",
    "^/(.*)$" => "/index.php/$1"
   )

Enabling CakePHP 1.1 on Lighttpd 1.5