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