During the course of many months there were many people complaining about the difficulty of installing Hypertable on their machines, but the root cause of the problem was many sophisticated dependencies required for performance reasons, and not Hypertable itself. Time passed and things have changed. There's now a more or less complete, down to the gory details dependency installation guide for various linux flavors as well as OS X 10.4 and 10.5 family.

For more technical details please visit HowToBuild page on Hypertable Wiki.