Indeed I did just that, the issue is that the only binary distributions for Linux are CentOS 6 and some flavor of Debian, both of which are dinosaurs compared to any modern distro. The long and short is the installation fails due to a missing dependency on antiquated libgmp.so.3, thus cooking my CPU for an hour and building from source.

If you want to talk about barriers to Haskell adoption, this is certainly one of them.

Without any clue of what constitutes "any modern distro" in your mind, I don't see how this can proceed further. Note that Centos 6.5 and Debian wheezy are the latest from their respective projects. I believe the Debian version will happily install under recent Ubuntu and derivatives.

I'm sorry your preferred distro doesn't have better support.

CentOS binary is the only choice and it won't work. FWIW CentOS 6 is equivalent to Fedora 12 or so (latest is Fedora 20).

Anyway, it's done, but a serious PITA, hopefully in future there will be a more sane way to get started exploring the latest & greatest.