Dear Simon, et al. I've looked around trying to pick up information on tiny installations of Linux. It seems most modern distributions think 200MB is a pretty barebone installation. There's a claim by someone that (s)he got a Tiny Gentoo installation into 5MB. I'll be looking into that this evening. Of the options given (installer vs. VM image), I have most faith in the VM image. From what I've seen, installers are still quite large (summed total of all downloads required) compared to a to-the-point installation. Could you be slightly more specific on what you want in the image for it to be a GHC development environment? I presume darcs is one. Also, I presume the GHC source tree isn't. Compiler-wise; do you want/need gcc on a system like this, if so, do you still want a binary GHC there? If a binary GHC is desired, do you want a bare minimum (w/o extralibs, possibly older version), the more elaborate (w/ extralibs), or the whole package (Haskell Platform)? Possibly the easiest VM image to maintain just has the minimum requirements to run emerge and a script that, on first boot of the image, emerges the haskell platform and darcs. This way, you don't need to update the VM image with updates of GHC (or updated dependencies of the GHC source tree on newer GHC versions). The upside is a very fast download of the image, but the downside is a very slow first boot of the image. Regards, Philip