I have now installed the recommended way --- build Hadoop branch-0.20-append, install and config it, then smash its Hadoop core jar into the HBase lib/. Very light testing revealed no problems. But the testing is still so little that I do not recommend drawing any conclusions about reliability.
BTW, Cloudera seems to pre-req specifically the Sun (now Oracle) JRE, so anyone who has a problem with that can not use Cloudera. Regards, Mike Spreitzer
