Saturday, April 13, 2013

Haskell Platform from source in Linux

So I spent my day installing Haskell in my new Linux (Ubuntu-12.10) machine. Also, I have cooked a delicious cake. :)

In brief, these are the minimum packages I needed to install before starting with Haskell:

  • libgmp3c2. GHC needs this to perform arbitrary precision arithmetic. You may also need libgmp-dev.
  • zlib1g-dev. Needed for the zlib library in the Haskell Platform.
  • freeglut3-dev. Nedeed for the Open GL bindings in the Haskell Platform.

If the Haskell Platform configure still complains about the Open GL C library, did you try to install libgl1-mesa-dev?

Stop looking further! This is all you need to get the Platform installed from the source. Well, this, and the source by itself. Once you have this just follow the instructions in GHC and the Haskell Platform to finish your installation. Also note that linking of executables requires tons of memory. This is what killed my PC. If this happens to you, you should set swappiness to 10. That may solve the problem. If not, you can always try with a lighter version of Linux.

Good luck, haskellers!

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