How to use Mahout in a Windows environment?
The only way you can run Hadoop on a Windows environment is to install Cygwin. For more info, see this blog post:
http://hayesdavis.net/2008/06/14/running-hadoop-on-windows/
Cygwin will provide all the command-line utilities (like chmod) that Hadoop relies on. You can still run your Hadoop jobs from within Eclipse if you want.
Do you know the SequenceFile API? Have a look here: http://hadoop.apache.org/common/docs/current/api/org/apache/hadoop/io/SequenceFile.htmlYou can try to write/read the data by yourself.
I think you can run Mahout from eclipse in Windowns in stand-alone mode. But you will appear several short comings and barriers. You should try how far you come.
In my opinion you shouldn't insist on running mahout from eclipse. ;-)
You can use a virtual machine to run you Hadoop environment.As for me, the best solution is using http://hortonworks.com/ project.Everything works pretty.