HBase/Hadoop Mac OS Installation Guide
Now we have a very detailed HBase/Hadoop installation guide for Mac OS thanks to Robert J. Berger :
You should now have a fully working Pseudo-Distributed Hadoop / HBase setup on your Mac. This is not suitable for any kind of large data or production project. In fact it will probably fail if you try to do anything with lots of data or high volumes of I/O. HBase seems to not like to work well until you get 4 – 5 regionservers.
But this Pseudo-Distributed version should be fine for doing experiments with tools and small data sets.
via: http://blog.ibd.com/scalable-deployment/hbase-hadoop-on-mac-ox-x/