For a stupid question, it has certainly started many a flame war and heated argument, and people still disagree greatly on it, so I would

The French say "Le goût et les couleurs, ça ne se discute as". I guess the same goes for operating systems...

not consider it such. The next question you should ask is which text editor to use... -Brian

No, I already had to switch to Emacs for doing Haskell development :) I still don’t really like it (I really should take the time to learn it properly, yes, ah, time, oh give me time...), but it's the best Haskell editor so far. So that will not change on Linux. You mentioned FreeBSD... That could also be an option yes... Thanks!

I can confirm that ghc-6.8.1 builds from source completely without fuss on the latest ubuntu (7.10). (... though it took a couple of hours of cpu time :-) Tim -----Original Message----- From: haskell-cafe-bounces@haskell.org [mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces@haskell.org] On Behalf Of Seth Gordon Sent: Wednesday, 7 November 2007 7:31 AM To: 'haskell-cafe Cafe' Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Best Linux for Haskell? Peter Verswyvelen wrote:

Each year I give Linux a try. And usually I kick it off my harddrive after a month, and stick to Windows. However, it does get better each year, so...

So which kind Linux works best for running GHC (6.8.1) and related tools? (I want to give Yi a go, I can't get it to work on Windows). Debian? Fedora? Ubuntu?

I don't know which Linux distribution is best *for Haskell*, but in my experience, Ubuntu has been the best distribution for getting up and running on Linux without fuss. The latest version lets you boot into Linux from a CD-ROM, so you can try it out and confirm that all your hardware is compatible before you touch anything on your hard drive. I haven't tried 6.8.1 yet, but I have downloaded and used the 6.6.x binaries on an Ubuntu system back when the repositories were still using an earlier version. I strongly suspect that if you got hold of 6.8.1 packages that were built for Debian, they would also install on Ubuntu, but I haven't tried doing that yet. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

On Nov 7, 2007 6:14 AM, Cale Gibbard wrote:

On 06/11/2007, Tim Docker wrote:

...

I can confirm that ghc-6.8.1 builds from source completely without fuss on the latest ubuntu (7.10).

(... though it took a couple of hours of cpu time :-)

Tim

I can confirm that the generic x86 binary package for 6.8.1 works on Ubuntu 7.10, provided that you use alien to install the readline-compat RPM which is provided on the same page.

Didn't work for me : Installs fine, ghci works fine, but I get linking problems. ld complains about -lgmp

On Nov 7, 2007 9:05 AM, Ketil Malde wrote:

david48 writes:

...

Didn't work for me : Installs fine, ghci works fine, but I get linking problems. ld complains about -lgmp

Did you try installing any of these?

% apt-cache search libgmp libgmp3-dev - Multiprecision arithmetic library developers tools libgmp3c2 - Multiprecision arithmetic library

I have to admit that I didn't... Since it already worked with 6.6.1. Anyways that dit it ( I was missing libgmp3-dev ), it works now. Thanks ! David.

Hallo, Maurí­cio escreveu:

Maybe (and only maybe), before choosing a distribution, you should choose a package system, since that's what you are going to use to install software. Look for RPM and APT, and see what you think. With my package system (I don't wanna give you any prejudice, so I won't tell you it's APT), I can get upgrades easily. But that's because I know how to use it. There are also other options beside RPM and APT.

Aptitude is much friendlier than APT. Cheers, Alex Queiroz

Martin DeMello wrote:

On 11/6/07, Maurí­cio wrote:

...

Maybe (and only maybe), before choosing a distribution, you should choose a package system, since that's what you are going to use to install software. Look for RPM and APT, and see what you think. With my package system (I don't wanna give you any prejudice, so I won't tell you it's APT), I can get upgrades easily. But that's because I know how to use it. There are also other options beside RPM and APT.

Gentoo's portage (inspired by FreeBSD's ports) is the best linux packaging system I've come across, but I wouldn't recommend Gentoo itself as a first distro. It makes a brilliant second one, though.

Even better, at least in theory, is Nix (http://nix.cs.uu.nl/index.html). Unfortunately it is not yet mature. And of course nobody uses it (yet ;-) BTW, Nix is based on a purely functional package description language which is also maximally lazy, meaning that syntactically equal terms are /always/ shared and only evaluated once. (And yes, it is of course turing complete.) Cheers Ben