I think it's pretty trivial to change the htaccess rewrite rule into an nginx/lighttpd rule.

It's just a matter of altering your nginx configuration to rewrite requests.

https://gist.github.com/3441804

In lighttpd, enable mod rewrite and:

url.rewrite-once = ( "^/(.*)$" => "index.php/$1" )

All of these routers work under Nginx or Lighttpd, they just need a different config file. Here's one that is often used under Nginx:

    location {
        root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
        index  index.php index.html index.htm;
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$request_uri;
    }