Build Hadoop from Source by Shashank Tiwari.
From the post:
If you are starting out with Hadoop, one of the best ways to get it working on your box is to build it from source. Using stable binary distributions is an option, but a rather risky one. You are likely to not stop at Hadoop common but go on to setting up Pig and Hive for analyzing data and may also give HBase a try. The Hadoop suite of tools suffer from a huge version mismatch and version confusion problem. So much so that many start out with Cloudera’s distribution, also know as CDH, simply because it solves this version confusion disorder.
Michael Noll’s well written blog post titled: Building an Hadoop 0.20.x version for HBase 0.90.2, serves as a great starting point for building the Hadoop stack from source. I would recommend you read it and follow along the steps stated in that article to build and install Hadoop common. Early on in the article you are told about a critical problem that HBase faces when run on top of a stable release version of Hadoop. HBase may loose data unless it is running on top an HDFS with durable sync. This important feature is only available in the branch-0.20-append of the Hadoop source and not in any of the release versions.
Assuming you have successfully, followed along Michael’s guidelines, you should have the hadoop jars built and available in a folder named ‘build’ within the folder that contains the Hadoop source. At this stage, its advisable to configure Hadoop and take a test drive.
A quick guide to “kicking the tires” as it were with part of the Hadoop eco-system.
I first saw this in the NoSQL Weekly Newsletter from http://www.NoSQLWeekly.com.