As long as your laptop is running a supported operating system (RHEL or CentOS 5/6, SLES 11, Ubuntu 12.04 / 14.04, Debian 7), you can just follow this guide: http://www.cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/documentation/core/latest/topics/cdh_qs.html Otherwise, you will first need to install one of these systems in a VM. You should be able to complete that Hadoop example in a VM with that much RAM, but be aware that you would have some trouble running the rest of the stack that is not core Hadoop: the QuickStart VM has everything pre-installed and configured, but requires 4GB of RAM for the VM itself. ... View more

You are correct - the username and password should both be 'cloudera' in the QuickStart VM. (It is 'admin' in Cloudera Live clusters hosted on GoGrid - which is where the screenshot comes from). I'll get that fixed in the next release. ... View more

The intermediate_access_log table is not intended to be viewed directly, especially not in Impala. In that tutorial step you're actually using Hive to do an ETL (extract transform load) job. The Apache logs are in a format that is hard to query directly through SQL, so we use one of Hive's extensions to express a regular expression to break up the fields more explicitly. After this step, the intermediate table is not useful. It's the second table you create (tokenized_access_logs) that should be queried from Impala. ... View more