Ok, when I did a runthrough to see what the error below was, I completely see your issue with the docs. 

Essentially, you want to do the following:
- Install Erlang (the version i used today was correct)
- Install a set of build tools, and git (`sudo apt-get install build-essential libc6-dev-i386 git`)
- Install Ruby 1.9.3 (`sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.3`)
- Install Bundler (`sudo gem install bundler`)
- Clone Riak from github.com/basho/riak (and `cd riak`)
- Make 4 dev nodes (`make devrel DEVNODES=4`)
- Do something about ulimit -n. More info here, but you want something around 4096 or above. http://docs.basho.com/riak/latest/cookbooks/Open-Files-Limit/
- Start dev nodes (`for d in dev/dev*; do $d/bin/riak start; done`)
- Join dev nodes to dev1 (`dev/dev2/bin/riak-admin cluster join 'dev1@127.0.0.1' and the same with `dev/dev3/...` and `dev/dev4/...`, then `dev/dev1/bin/riak-admin cluster plan` then `dev/dev1/bin/riak-admin cluster commit`)

Then you're sorted. I'll try and put something like this into some docs somewhere.