also, a good strategy with bigtop is to "start small"... Pick your use case, 
such as 

- I want to run bigtops smoke tests against my hadoop cluster for mahout, hive 
and pig to ensure that everything is working properly 

Or

- I want to create custom rpm installs for my own hadoop and hive distributions 

Or 

- I want a VM for my developers with hadoop, mr2 and the latest hbase version .

Generally I've found that there is usually support for specific problems on 
this mailing list. Sometimes you have to ask twice though because people get 
busy :)...

> On Nov 21, 2013, at 2:37 AM, Bruno Mahé <[email protected]> wrote:
> See inline.
> 
>> On 11/20/2013 06:10 PM, Sean Mackrory wrote:
>> >> Is there a ‘getting started’ guide?
>> 
>> Beyond just installation, most of our documentation is very
>> developer-centric, I'm afraid. What there is can be found on our wiki:
>> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/BIGTOP/Index
>> 
>> >> Something that will describe the filesystem and configuration file
>> conventions?
>> 
>> Bigtop is a distribution of other open-source projects, so there is no
>> single configuration system. The file conventions will vary from project
>> to project, however Bigtop does not modify much about how the
>> configuration files work, so I would refer you to the upstream projects
>> for details of their configuration files (eg. http://hadoop.apache.org,
>> http://hbase.apache.org)
> 
> 
> I would like also to point out that while it's true that each project has its 
> own way to be configured, Apache Bigtop packages projects in ways which 
> should be familiar to GNU/Linux users and sysadmins.
> For instance, service scripts a provided and available through the usual 
> means, all the config files are in /etc/<project>/, all the logs in 
> /var/log/<project>/...
> Most project's files can also be found in /usr/lib/<project>/
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> >> In particular the existence of these conf.empty directories is
>> confusing.
>> 
>> The conf.dist and conf.empty directories provide some default or
>> template configuration files. You should create a directory at the same
>> level for your own configuration. Perhaps "conf.steven". There is a
>> symlink for each component at /etc/<component>/conf. This symlink,
>> through a system called "alternatives", eventually points to the
>> currently active configuration for that component. Once you have
>> modified the configuration to suit your needs, you can make it the
>> active configuration using the alternatives command. See here for it's
>> documentation:
>> http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl8_alternatives.htm. For
>> example, if you look at the /etc/hadoop/conf symlink, you will probably
>> find that it points to /etc/alternatives/hadoop-conf. You can see how
>> the alternatives are configured and point the configuration to your new
>> folder like this:
>> 
>> alternatives --display hadoop-conf
>> alternatives --set hadoop-conf /etc/hadoop/conf.steven
>> 
>> >> Is Hue supposed to be configured separately, or is BigTop supposed
>> to do that?
>> 
>> As I recall, the misconfigurations that are reported at startup are
>> things like services not running (like Oozie, etc.) Once you configure
>> and start those services, these warnings should disappear. For other
>> warnings, post them here and we'll see if we can help you.
>> 
>> >> What is the target time to set-up a Hadoop installation via BigTop?
>> 
>> Not sure what to tell you here. I regularly set up pseudo-distributed
>> Hadoop installations in minutes with little more than "yum install
>> hadoop-conf-pseudo", "sudo service hadoop-hdfs-namenode init" and a
>> reboot. If you're using a bunch of other services on a fully-distributed
>> cluster and you're completely new to this, I would expect it take hours
>> / days to get everything running. Bigtop also maintains puppet code that
>> will configure everything with a pretty good default configuration and
>> have your cluster working pretty much out-of-the-box. Maybe this is a
>> good option for you?
>> 
>> >> Can you send me your private email and I will be able to send you my
>> configuration up to now.
>> 
>> As I mentioned, our documentation is very developer-centric, and as
>> Steven is showing, some user-centric documentation would be a huge help
>> to the community. Could I persuade you to share what you've learned on
>> the mailing list, or perhaps on the wiki so others can benefit?
> 
> +1.
> 
> Please share with us what went wrong, what went right, what you wished 
> someone had told you.
> So we can document these issues.
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> Bruno

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