I had the exact same problem on an Ubuntu server at work. Since I don't have root access, I was forced to compile from source. I gave up when I couldn't compile Cabal.
My solution was Multimarkdown 4 [1]. It supports many basic Pandoc features I need (tables, etc.). Exports to HTML and PDF. Since it is written in C, the compilation was straight forward. 10 minutes later, my document is ready. Couldn't have been happier.