It’s easy to install Hadoop on a single machine to try it out.
Prerequisites
Hadoop is written in Java, so you will need to have Java installed on your machine,
version 6 or later. Sun's JDK is the one most widely used with Hadoop, although others
have been reported to work.
Hadoop runs on Unix and on Windows. Linux is the only supported production plat-
form, but other flavors of Unix (including Mac OS X) can be used to run Hadoop for
development. Windows is only supported as a development platform, and additionally
requires Cygwin to run. During the Cygwin installation process, you should include
the openssh package if you plan to run Hadoop in pseudo-distributed mode.
Installation
Start by deciding which user you’d like to run Hadoop as. For trying out Hadoop or
developing Hadoop programs, it is simplest to run Hadoop on a single machine using
your own user account.
Download a stable release, which is packaged as a gzipped tar file, from the Apache
Hadoop releases page (http://hadoop.apache.org/core/releases.html) and unpack it
somewhere on your filesystem:
% tar -xzf hadoop-x.y.z.tar.gz
