[Haskell-cafe] OT: Good Linux distro for netbook + Haskell?

[Quentin Moser]

On Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:53:49 -0400
Adam Turoff <adam.turoff at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> I got an Eee PC this winter and I started playing with Arch Linux on
> it. Seems nice in theory, but the hardware is weird enough that you'll
> need to spend a lot of time fiddling to get the right modules
> installed properly to get things like wifi working.  Quickly turned
> into an exercise in yak shaving instead of haskell hacking.
> 

Recent kernels (from ~2.6.28 onwards) have removed the need for any
special configuration on an Eee 900. All necessary modules are now
standard, and pm-utils supports suspend/resume perfectly. Things should
run pretty much out of the box now (at least, I don't think I'm using
any special packages or configs on my Eee anymore). Also, graphic
performance has become OK again with the latest X server. 

Having an up-to-date GHC in the repos is nice, but I'm not sure about
the cabal2arch stuff. The lack of support for multiple versions of
packages in pacman hurts pretty bad with hackage, because the APIs of
some common packages seem to change quickly and you often end up with
dependencies on different versions. Using cabal-install instead is an
easy solution to this though, and with up-to-date ghc, cabal and
cabal-install packages in the Arch repos you don't have much trouble
bootstrapping it. So Arch can probably be considered pretty
Haskell-friendly.

Haskell aside, Arch also gives me a pretty nice general experience on my
Eee 900. Being a DIY distro of course helps since full  solutions these
days seem to expect a lot from my system capabilities and screen
resolution.