Bigtop

Apache Bigtop is by far the easiest to install Hadoop distribution. I was able to get it work on an
CentOS VM. Unfortunately the bundled Spark is 1.5.1, which does not work well with the sparklyr package. I have not figured out how to make the yarn manager work with a third-party copy of Spark  yet. Need to wait for the Bigtop distribution to upgrade.

Snowdoop

This looks promising.

Getting Hadoop and RHadoop to work

I managed to get Hadoop and RHadoop installed on my workstation.

1. Install Hadoop following these suggestions;
2. Install Thrift following these suggestions;
3. Install "rmr", "rhdfs", and "plyrmr" here.

This post is also quite helpful.