I just ran through this as a new user and had trouble w/ the JAVA_HOME setting. Per the instructions, I had JAVA_HOME set appropriately (via my .bashrc), but not in conf/hadoop-env.sh. Would be good if "1." under "Required Software" specified where JAVA_HOME should be set.
http://hadoop.apache.org/core/docs/current/quickstart.html Cheers, Jason P.S. Very nice that there is a quick start like this. So many projects lack something like this to get you started...
