WP network activation failing with Mamp

1.2.9 I should have said. Changed permalinks to date and name, no change.
Yes, BP works on the main site even with out the theme you can type the link and get it to work. But follow the links through to say a post in a forum topic and you get a 404 as the link now includes the secondary site.

Yes, BP works on the main site even with out the theme you can type the link and get it to work.

this to me says something’s jacked up server side, like your htaccess file. because they should not work at all.

Have found why those links still work. i had, in trying to find out what was going on, activated the BP template pack and it had added in some additional files to the current theme. Even though I deactivated the template pack those files stayed where they were and appear to be the cause of the links working, as on removal of the files the links no longer work.

To cut a long story short, I’ve now got the site to function again.
In looking through the BP codex I found this:

‘Allow BuddyPress to function on multiple blogs of a WPMU installation, not just on one root blog:
define ( ‘BP_ENABLE_MULTIBLOG’, true );’

So i added the above line to the config file and bingo, it works again. The main site, still does not link to BP, so I am happy enough.
I think the only thing thats different is in the members list, not exactly sure what, the list seems longer, maybe, now includes members from the main site. Anyway, so far, it doesn’t affect functionality.
Its been a long haul, and in the end, just one line needed!
I have to thank you Andrea, I don’t think I would have got my solution without your input. Thank you!

A follow up to this, I was happy enough with this solution to begin with but there were a few little things that were not as I wanted them. My BuddyPress site was carrying the name of the main site and not the name I’d originally assigned to it, that was the main niggle.

So I installed virgin copes of WP3.21 and the new beta2 of BuddyPress 1.5 on my mamp dev set up. I added the line define ‘(‘BP_ROOT_BLOG’, 2);’ to the wp-confif file before installing BP and before activating Multisite. In activating multisite I put the additional lines below the ‘define (‘BP_ROOT_BLOG’, 2 );’ line, I completed the process and what do you know, BP shows up on the secondary site. Wow!

So after a few minutes of self congratulation, I’m thinking to remove the,
‘define (‘BP_ENABLE_MULTIBLOG’, true);’ in the WP-config.php file on my live (hosted) site and move ‘define (‘BP_ROOT_BLOG’, 3);’ to the top of the added instructions. I try this and it works! A month of frustration gone in an instant!

I had also removed any spaces between between the brackets and the quote marks e.g.
( ‘BP_ROOT_BLOG’, 2 ) became (‘BP_ROOT_BLOG’, 2). I don’t really know if this made a difference but its what i did.

So folks, it finally does what it says on the tin!