Introduction
Cassandra is an advanced topic, and while work is always underway to make things easier, it can still be daunting to get up and running for the first time. This document aims to provide a few easy to follow steps to take the first-time user from installation, to an operational Cassandra cluster.
Step 0: Prerequisites and connection to the community
Cassandra requires the most stable version of Java 1.6 you can deploy. For Sun's jvm, this means at least u19; u21 is better. Cassandra also runs on the IBM jvm, and should run on jrockit as well.
The best way to ensure you always have up to date information on the project, releases, stability, bugs, and features is to subscribe to the users mailing list (subscription required) and participate in the #cassandra channel on IRC.
