I'm a beginner to both Cabal and Linux. I'm a bit confused as to whether I need to be using Cabal when installng packages.
There's no real confront between then, as cabal will default to install its packages in your home directory. Follow this rule in Ubuntu: install what's available from Ubuntu repositories (using Synaptic) and, whenever you want, need or feel like doing it, install from cabal. If something goes wrong for any reason, just rm ~/.cabal and you get back to what you have in a fresh install. (If you are a begginer in Haskell: also do use cabal system to package your own programs. This will give you a good understandment on how the package system work, and let you more confortable to experiment with advanced language features.) Best, Maurício