A Linux operating system is the preferred environment for Hadoop. The major Hadoop distributors, MapR, Cloudera, and HortonWorks provide VMs to get started easily with Hadoop and related frameworks.

On Linux, we can also either manually install the required services or install a preconfigured bundle. BentoBox is a zero-configuration bundle that provides a suitable environment for testing and prototyping projects that use HDFS, MapReduce, and HBase with minimal setup time. The installation process requires:

$ cd /opt/
$ wget http://archive.kiji.org/tarballs/kiji-bento-dashi-1.4.3-release.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf kiji-bento-dashi-1.4.3-release.tar.gz
$ cd kiji-bento-dashi/
$ export KIJI_HOME=/opt/kiji-bento-dashi
$ source $KIJI_HOME/bin/kiji-env.sh
$ export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/j2sdk1.6-oracle/
$ bento start

Within a few minutes, we can have all the Hadoop daemons and our HDFS filesystem initiated.

Cluster webapps can be visited at these web addresses:
 HDFS NameNode...