[xmonad] Customizing xmonad on debian lenny

[Chris Jones]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 12:53:08PM EST, julien steinhauser wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 11:33:16AM -0500, Chris Jones wrote:

> > When you apt-get xmonad, regardless of the version, debian ends up
> > installing what looks like close to a hundred packages. Meaning that
> > I was concerned that trying to install manually might have landed me
> > in dependency hell. I don't think this would have been the case,
> > though: despite the large number of packages, and size thereof.. the
> > actual dependency is quite trivial: you just need a working Haskell
> > environment in order to configure xmonad. Doesn't look like a case
> > of fifteen layers of libraries, with half of them dummy packages to
> > resolve compatiblity issues.
> > 
> Your debian seems not like mine, if I remember well I just needed
> those packages to get a XMonad with full extensions :

They're all different :-)

I assume that the difference is that I have a very minimal system that
was installed one package at a time, not via the gnome-desktop, or
KDE-desktop, or whatever they call these things in the installer, and
that a lot of other stuff that was already installed on your system --
and that I had managed so far not to install on mine -- eventually got
pulled in.. oh, well..

> $ apt-get source xmonad xmonad-contrib
> 
> # aptitude install ghc6 libghc6-mtl-dev libghc6-utf-8-string-dev
> libghc6-x11-dev libghc6-x11-xft-dev

Makes sense to me. Unfortunately, I was doing something else at the time
the install was running and I didn't really bother making even a mental
note of what these extra packages were. I'm sure there's a way I could
find out, this is debian after all, probably some log or other in
/var/cache/apt .. but since all went well and since it's not working on
the lenny system anyway, I think I'll just do an apt-get remove --purge
followed by an autoremove and focus on the squeeze system for now.

> > One quick question, I see a bunch of screenshots on the xmonad wiki
> > and some look pretty much like what I'm trying to end up with, but
> > the configuration files or scripts appear not to have been made
> > available.

> This is surely what you look for :
> 
> http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive

Precisely what I was looking for.. not sure how I missed it.

Thank you for your comments.

CJ