[xmonad] Customizing xmonad on debian lenny

[Chris Jones]

I have been trying to customize a couple of things in xmonad 0.7
following the online tutorials to the letter and after a week of
frustration, I'm beginning to think that these tutorials only cover the
current release, which would explain why whatever I tried always seemed
to result in bizarre undocumented errors.

The product works fine out of the box as long as you just use the
defaults, but there are just a couple of things I need to change, such
as some of the key bindings (which happen to clash with bindings I have
defined in applications I run frequently), as well as the default
terminal and the corresponding $TERM environment variable, for instance.

Besides, I would like to set up a system status bar at the bottom of
the screen, and apparently this is not available by default. 

This is a debian stable aka "lenny" system, and the version of xmonad is
as expected pretty ancient.

I wouldn't mind installing the current stable version of xmonad, but
since the version from the debian stable repository pulled something
like 400 Meg of Haskell dependencies, I have a feeling this is probably
not going to be straightforward.

Or should I wait till the current debian testing, aka squeeze becomes
stable, and hopefully things will work as advertised?

Please advise.

CJ