Here are my system settings:==
~$ echo
$PATH/home/puneet/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/home/puneet/bin:/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/bin:/home/puneet/sw/hadoop/bin:/bin:/home/puneet/sw/apache-ant-1.8.1/bin:.:/h
Have you tried running it via the giraph cmd line entry point?
As in:
$ HADOOP_HOME=XXX
$ HADOOP_CONF_DIR=YYY
$ PATH=$GIRAPH_HOME/bin:$HADOOP_HOME/bin:$PATH
$ giraph
$GIRAPH_HOME/giraph-examples/target/giraph-examples-1.1.0-for-hadoop-1.2.1-jar-with-dependencies.jar
org.apache.giraph.
On Hadoop 1.2.1, and Giraph 1.1.0 I tried following command
hadoop jar
$GIRAPH_HOME/giraph-examples/target/giraph-examples-1.1.0-for-hadoop-1.2.1-jar-with-dependencies.jar
org.apache.giraph.GiraphRunner
org.apache.giraph.examples.SimpleShortestPathsComputation -vif
org.apache.giraph.io.format