I've been able to build, start, and run simple tests on the code in the apache repo.
We should add default conf files and logging props to make this easier. The conf file from Jonathan's early build patch seems to work fine. I had to change my old conf file entries from <ColumnFamily Index="Name">CF1</ColumnFamily> to <ColumnFamily Index="Name" Name="CF1"></ColumnFamily> I've added an entry in JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-4
