I would highly recommend you watch this - https://laracasts.com/lessons/get-off-mamp-now and use a VM.

Install vagrant and virtual box and also see http://laravel.com/docs/homestead Homestead is great and you can host all your Laravel projects on one box and all in the same, its simple and fast to setup.

I am not sure if you are using a Mac or not, but did you point the server correctly. I first open my CLI and type

cd/whatever directory

then

php -S localhost:8879

In app.php is your error reporting turned on?

Here is the .htaccess file on use which works on my local and live server. Maybe you did not specify the version of php required.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
# Use PHP 5.3
AddType application/x-httpd-php53 .php
    <IfModule mod_negotiation.c>
        Options -MultiViews
    </IfModule>

    RewriteEngine On

    # Redirect Trailing Slashes...
    RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]

    # Handle Front Controller...
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Try this, this took me forever to figure out when I first installed Laravel 4 on a mac. If php version pointing to Mac PHP version and not MAMP PHP

then in CLI
touch .bash_profile
open .bash_profile
then type:
export PATH=/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.5.10/bin:$PATH
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