Before we begin with Haskell & Yesod: the environment

So, a word about the environment I’m going to use. I’m going to do my general hacking in Haskell on Ubuntu 12.04, running on either my MacBook Air or a Nokia Booklet 3G, depending on what’s closer. I’ll be using the haskell-platform installed from the stable debian repository. As I want to push things into a “production” instance, I’m going to be hosting things on Amazon’s EC2 — if I get serious about this project and want to share data, I’ll scale out on EC2.

Getting Started: Ubuntu on the MacBook Air
Installing Ubuntu Desktop i386 12.04 on my MacBook Air was a bit of a trial, and I didn’t document all the steps thoroughly. The general approach was to follow the steps at the Ubuntu site here, although one thing I did that gave me problems was to create a separate partition on the drive for the installation media, because doing that meant that I couldn’t repartition the disk when I did the install. Eventually, I was able to make a bootable USB stick, boot the USB stick using rEFit, format the new partitions, and I was set. Dual-booting between Ubuntu and Mac OS X using both the built in ssytem and rEFit works great.

Getting Started: Ubuntu on the Nokia Booklet 3G
I have a special place in my heart for the Nokia Booklet 3G, because the darned thing is indestructible, and sports a 3G modem for anywhere-wireless connectivity. Unfortunately, it feels about as slow as the VAX 11/70 I shared with sixty university students the week before finals, so it doesn’t get as much love from me as it otherwise might. But I prefer its keyboard over that on the MacBook Air, actually, and the pretty blue cover just looks sweet.

Earlier releases of Ubuntu on the Booklet were pesky to set up because of the stupid integrated graphics driver, but that’s been well-documented for some time. Here’s what I did to get things running:

  1. Use UNetBoot to create a bootable USB stick with Ubuntu Desktop i386 12.04.
  2. When booting from the stick, switch to the console using ctrl-alt-f1, log in, and
    sudo lightdm restart to get past the black screen.
  3. Run the installer as normal.
  4. When the system reboots, switch to the console using ctrl-alt-f1, log in, and
    sudo lightdm restart to get past the black screen.
  5. Fix the video issue permanently on boot by editing the grub configuration: change GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub to "quiet console=tty1 acpi_backlight=vendor acpi_osi=Linux mem=896mb" and update grub using sudo update-grub.
  6. Fix a problem with the trackpad during standby by editing /etc/pm/config.d/gma500 and adding the line ADD_PARAMETERS='-quirk-vbemode-restore'.

Getting Started: Getting Haskell and Yesod on Ubuntu
Once you’ve got Ubuntu all set up and updated with the latest packages, open a shell and run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install emacs23
sudo apt-get install haskell-platform
sudo apt-get install haskell-mode

Now, add $HOME/.cabal/bin to your path in your .bashrc or the shell configuration of choice, and reload the shell configuration file.

cabal update
cabal install yesod-platform

to install yesod.

Getting Started: Getting Haskell and Yesod on EC2
I couldn’t get a base AMI instance running with a later version of the haskell platform — I chose an instance that was too small and cabal failed to build. Picking a bigger instance, I couldn’t get the Haskell platform to build with the version of ghc that I chose. I then moved to using a RedHat instance backed by ebs, and as root:


yum update
yum install gmp-devel
rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-7.noarch.rpm
yum install haskell-platform

To get Yesod running, as your development user:

cabal update
cabal install yesod-platform

Next up: setting up my first site!

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