Note: Cloudera Desktop 0.4.1 is a private beta for the next version of Cloudera Desktop. Please contact us at desktop-feedback@cloudera.com with feedback, comments, bugs, etc. We ask that you don’t discuss this new version publically just quite yet. Thanks!
The manual has instructions to install Cloudera Desktop. You may be specifically interested in installing on a single-machine (pseudo-distributed) cluster, installing using packages, and installing using tarballs.
We also have available a VMware Image, suitable for running with VMware Player, Workstation, or Fusion, with Hadoop and Cloudera Desktop pre-configured. After downloading, login into Linux with username "training" and password "training", open up Firefox, and check out Cloudera Desktop (username and password are both "training", as well).
We encourage you to build an application within the Cloudera Desktop environment. See the SDK Documentation to get started. Download the SDK at downloads/cloudera-desktop-SDK-0.4.1.tgz.