I was totally impressed with the Cloudera distribution of Hadoop – they clearly have the coolest bundle available. While watching the presentation, I whipped up a Chef Solo tarball that will install their Hadoop distribution for Ubuntu.
First, make sure you have Chef installed, and then:
chef-solo -r http://chef-solo-hadoop.s3.amazonaws.com/hadoop-cloudera-ubuntu.tar.gz
And you are good to go!