xmonad install on OpenSUSE 11.2

Just my notes on how I got xmonad working on my PC at home (I also am running it at work). Please remember that I am only configuring this to work for my user account instead of setting it up globally.

Prerequisites

The Glasgow Haskell Compilation system - http://packages.opensuse-community.org/index.jsp?distro=openSUSE_112&searchTerm=ghc
Installed via 1-click install

Installed via YaST:
xorg-x11-devel
xorg-x11-libx11-devel
xorg-x11-libXext-devel
zlib-devel

Cabal - Downloaded http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/cabal-install/0.6.4/cabal-install-0.6.4.tar.gz

$ tar xvzf cabal-install-0.6.4.tar.gz
$ cd cabal-install-0.6.4/
$ chmod +x bootstrap.sh
$ ./bootstrap.sh
...
Linking dist/build/cabal/cabal ...
Installing executable(s) in /home/jholbrook/.cabal/bin

The 'cabal' program has been installed in /home/jholbrook/.cabal/bin/
You should either add /home/jholbrook/.cabal/bin to your PATH
or copy the cabal program to a directory that is on your PATH.

The first thing to do is to get the latest list of packages with:
cabal update

This will also create a default config file (if it does not already
exist) at /home/jholbrook/.cabal/config

By default cabal will install programs to /home/jholbrook/.cabal/bin
If you do not want to add this directory to your PATH then you can
change the setting in the config file, for example you could use:
symlink-bindir: /home/jholbrook/bin

$ ~/.cabal/bin/update
Config file path source is default config file.
Config file /home/jholbrook/.cabal/config not found.
Writing default configuration to /home/jholbrook/.cabal/config
Downloading the latest package list from hackage.haskell.org

$ ln -s ~/.cabal/bin/cabal ~/bin/cabal
$ cabal install xmonad
$ cabal install xmonad-contrib
$ ln -s ~/.cabal/bin/xmonad ~/bin/xmonad

Edit ~/.xinitrc and add the following:

exec /home/username/bin/xmonad

Restart X and you should be running xmonad. Hit ALT+SHIFT+ENTER to open a shell