See this wiki page to get started with hypertable in 5 minutes. Note, the linux packages require glibc 2.4+ for stack smashing protection, which is available in most current distributions. People stuck with older distributions with pre 2.4 glibc can build the binary packages themselves, according to the HowToPackage article.
Currently the packages are only tested on 10.5.x (Leopard). I heard it crashes on 10.6.x (Snow Leopard), if you want to help us figuring out how to build a package that works on both platforms, visit Hypertable-dev group