Thanks for all the suggestions. Having had great success with Gnome2-fallback in the past, I decided to try Mate out again with the latest xmonad-contrib (is that what everyone means by latest xmonad from darcs?).
I started with a fresh install of Linux Mint 17.1 with Mate, updated, etc. I installed xmonad and cabal-install. I was not able to install xmonad-contrib (command line details below). Any suggestions?
Additionally, I have the most basic xmonad.hs file, yet cannot re-compile (Could not find package 'XMonad'). The xmonad-contrib is not available via Mint's apt-get.
Mint's xmonad.desktop file is nearly identical to the config described here:
https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_MATE . However, the dconf suggestion does not work. Selecting 'Xmonad' from the GUI Login displays the GHC/xmonad --recompile error again and otherwise presents a blank xmonad session. I have no terminal, probably because I cannot compile 'terminal = "mate-terminal"' in xmonad.hs. Alt-Shift-Q works: logout. Selecting 'gnome-xmonad.desktop' is equally useless (though technically working).
> Sorry, but could you describe exactly what are the problems you encountered?
With
XFCE, I was able to get a semi-working system from a freshly installed Xubuntu. In a vanilla XFCE session, 'xmonad --replace' from the command line seems to work. But I could not start a fresh
session with Xmonad. At best, the panel would not display (although it
was running) and there would be a blank/transparent tile. I removed most
Mate keyboard shortcuts, yet Meta-Shift-Return only sometimes opened a
terminal.
I was not able to get Cinnamon to work at all -- I don't recall the specific issues.
I don't recall my earlier issues with Mint/Mate, but I've described several issues above and some command line details below.
# apt-get install xmonad cabal-install
# xmonad --version
xmonad 0.11
# cabal --version
cabal-install version 1.16.0.2
using version 1.16.0 of the Cabal library
# cabal install xmonad-contrib
Resolving dependencies...
Configuring X11-1.6.1.2...
...etc...
checking X11/extensions/Xinerama.h usability... no
checking X11/extensions/Xinerama.h presence... no
checking for X11/extensions/Xinerama.h... no
WARNING: Xinerama headers not found. Building without Xinerama support
checking X11/extensions/Xrandr.h usability... no
checking X11/extensions/Xrandr.h presence... no
checking for X11/extensions/Xrandr.h... no
configure: error: X11/extensions/Xrandr.h (from libXrandr) is required
Failed to install X11-1.6.1.2
cabal: Error: some packages failed to install:
X11-1.6.1.2 failed during the configure step. The exception was:
ExitFailure 1
X11-xft-0.3.1 depends on X11-1.6.1.2 which failed to install.
xmonad-0.11 depends on X11-1.6.1.2 which failed to install.
xmonad-contrib-0.11.3 depends on X11-1.6.1.2 which failed to install.
The following did not help
# apt-get install xorg xinerama, libXrandr, X11-utils, etc
# Xorg -version
X.Org X Server 1.15.1
Release Date: 2014-04-13
$ cat xmonad.hs