This week's book giveaway is in the Agile and other Processes forum. We're giving away four copies of The Mikado Method and have Ola Ellnestam and Daniel Brolund on-line! See this thread for details.
Everything I tried online failed miserably. I think at some point I got the services for a name-node, job tracker, task tracker and data node, but when I tried to run the built in sample map reduce jobs they wouldn't run. If I tried to do a mkdir it was slow as molassas, whereas after 15 minutes of waiting I just ctrl-C it.