I’ve been curious about the xmonad window manager, and decided to install it on Gutsy. Here’s the drill. First we install some required libraries, and Haskell (needed to compile xmonad).

sudo aptitude install libxext-dev libghc6-mtl-dev libxt-dev ghc6

Next download the source for xmonad and its prerequisites.

wget http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/mtl/1.0/mtl-1.0.tar.gz;
wget http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/X11-extras/0.4/X11-extras-0.4.tar.gz;
wget http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/X11/1.2.3/X11-1.2.3.tar.gz ;
wget http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/xmonad/0.4/xmonad-0.4.tar.gz ;

Now build the packages just downloaded:

tar xzf mtl-1.0.tar.gz;
cd mtl-1.0;
sudo runhaskell Setup.* configure;
runhaskell Setup.* build;
sudo runhaskell Setup.* install;

cd ..;
tar xzf X11-1.2.3.tar.gz ;
cd X11-1.2.3/;
sudo runhaskell Setup.* configure;
runhaskell Setup.* build;
sudo runhaskell Setup.* install;

cd ..;
tar xzf X11-extras-0.4.tar.gz ;
cd X11-extras-0.4/;
sudo runhaskell Setup.* configure;
runhaskell Setup.* build; sudo runhaskell Setup.* install;

cd ..;
tar xzf xmonad-0.4.tar.gz ;
pushd xmonad-0.4/;
runhaskell Setup.* configure --prefix=$HOME --user;
runhaskell Setup.* build; runhaskell Setup.* install;

Next set up a .xinitrc file. This worked one for me:

#!/bin/sh
if [ -f $HOME/.Xdefaults ]; then
   xrdb -merge ${HOME}/.Xdefaults
fi
xsetroot -solid black
DISPLAY=:0.0 xmonad

Make the .xinitrc file executable, then log out of gnome. Select the appropriate session choice in the gdm options, and log back in. If everything goes correctly you will see a completely black screen. Don’t worry, that’s what you’re supposed to see. This xmonad guide provides a tour of the available features. If you have been looking for a no-mouse-required, window manager, this is the ticket. If you want to, you can even run xmonad under gnome. Enjoy.