I'm just emailing about not being able to install the package
'haskell-platform', which is suggested by both of the textbooks, in
the current version of Ubuntu (13.04).

After some fishing around, I checked the package list on Ubuntu's
website for 'haskell-platform', and it appears that you can manually
install the most recent versions of the packages in Ubuntu 13.04
without any apparent issues. Allegedly 'haskell-platform' will work in
the next release, 13.10. I just thought a small note somewhere might
save someone from trying to install GHC from source and then having a
very wireframe install of the haskell compiler, seeing as it's
unlikely that Ubuntu is the only distro with this issue.

The install command is:
sudo apt-get install ghc alex cabal-install happy libghc-cgi-dev libghc-fgl-dev libghc-glut-dev libghc-haskell-src-dev libghc-html-dev libghc-http-dev libghc-hunit-dev libghc-mtl-dev libghc-network-dev libghc-opengl-dev libghc-parallel-dev libghc-parsec3-dev  libghc-quickcheck2-dev libghc-regex-base-dev libghc-regex-compat-dev  libghc-regex-posix-dev libghc-stm-dev libghc-syb-dev  libghc-text-dev  libghc-transformers-dev  libghc-xhtml-dev libghc-zlib-dev

(Leaving out the two packages haskell-platform-doc and
haskell-platform-prof which are both unavailable.)

Also the package 'haskell-mode' for emacs is helpful. You need to
add /home/infteach/.emacs from DICE to your Linux machine after
installing Haskell mode, otherwise it doesn't work. (Same as in the
labweek instructions)

Apparently the haskell platform will be available in the next version
of Ubuntu which comes out late October, and was available in at least
the previous two releases.