The new auto-installer script is working well enough that I think most people should be able to get the beta of ELSA installed now. I put up a short post with the details and screenshots on my blog here: http://ossectools.blogspot.com/2011/11/elsa-beta-available.html .
From the project page (http://code.google.com/p/enterprise-log-search-and-archive/):
Features: * High-volume receiving/indexing (a single node can receive > 30k logs/sec, sustained) * Full Active Directory/LDAP integration for authentication, authorization, email settings * Instant ad-hoc reports/graphs on arbitrary queries even on enormous data sets * Email alerting, scheduled reports * Plugin architecture for web interface * Distributed architecture for clusters * Ships with normalization for some Cisco logs, Snort/Suricata, Bro, and Windows via Eventlog-to-Syslog or Snare Many thanks to Peter for helping me test the auto-installer, as well as all of Balabit for providing such an amazingly fast syslog parser with PatternDB. Please let me know if you run into issues installing. Ubuntu, openSUSE, and CentOS have been tested, but variations of those distros should work fine.