Why would I do this?

An OSX laptop will not allow to do any larger scale data processing, but it may be convenient place to develop/debug hadoop scripts before running on a real cluster. For this you likely want to have a local hadoop “cluster” to play with, and use the local commands as client for an larger remote hadoop cluster. This post covers the local install and basic testing. A second post shows how to extend the setup for accessing /processing against a remote kerberized cluster.