Thank-you for reading this. I am stuck at step three on this tutorial pertaining to installing Cassandra: http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/GettingStarted#Step_3:_Start_Cassandra
I found a solution! I ran sudo -u cassandra /usr/sbin/cassandra -f
and then ran into problems with the commitlog
directory Phact mentions in his answer. I then ran Phact's recursive chown command, sudo chown -R cassandra:cassandra /var/lib/cassandra/commitlog
and the Cassandra server started up correctly just as it would if I was running the program as the root user. :D :D :D
Give the user you want permissions to the data and commitlog dirs.
sudo chown -R cassandra:cassandra /var/lib/cassandra/data
sudo chown -R cassandra:cassandra /var/lib/cassandra/commitlog