How do I disable Multibyte string input conversion in PHP?

Question

I am attempting to install Drupal 7 on my local debian jessie machine, and it is telling me the following:

Multibyte string input conversion in PHP is active and must be disabled. Check the php.ini mbstring.http_input setting. Please refer to the PHP mbstring documentation for more information.

Ok, so I head over to the php documentation linked in that message and it provides me with a lot of (helpful, I am sure) information not at all related to disabling "Multibyte string input conversion". If it's there, I didn't find it.

I googled and came up with a thread on drupal.org, which claims:

Since Drupal made it mandatory to disable mbstring.http_input and its 'relatives', a lot complaints regarding Drupal installation was raised everywhere in cyberspace. It's not a problem if you own your own server, and there's a lot of workaround.

And provides a link to a page that I add the following to my .htaccess file:

php_value mbstring.http_input pass
php_value mbstring.http_output pass

So I had a look in my .htaccess file and found this:

# PHP 5, Apache 1 and 2.                                                        
<IfModule mod_php5.c>                                                           
  php_flag magic_quotes_gpc                 off                                 
  php_flag magic_quotes_sybase              off                                 
  php_flag register_globals                 off                                 
  php_flag session.auto_start               off                                 
  php_value mbstring.http_input             pass                                
  php_value mbstring.http_output            pass                                
  php_flag mbstring.encoding_translation    off                                 
</IfModule>                    

Right, so now what?

EDIT: Just added the following line to my php.ini file:

mbstring.http_input = pass ; No conversion.

and ran service apache2 reload. No effect.

Answer 1

Added the following to my php.ini file:

mbstring.http_input = pass ;
mbstring.http_output = pass ;

then I ran

sudo service apache2 reload

And then I could install drupal manually, however, if I try using drush I still get the error, so this is really just half a solution...