removing index.php from URLs

hello!

I finally got my local version of wordpress uploaded to a remote server and, i think, everything is working. however, i would like help with the following:

(1)for my site pages, all my urls are structured as follows: http://mydomainname.com/index.php/category/title/. for posts its a similar thing:

http://mydomainname.com/index.php/2006/10/18/sample-post/

basically, this is the “date and name based” permalink option. how do i get rid of the index.php portion of both of the above URLs? the rest of the url is fine..

(2) my home page is showing for http://mydomain.com and when i type in http://www.mydomain.com, it shows up as well. are there any issues with not having the www subdomain included in the URL’s?

thanks