Ok, I tried nix but I couldn't get it to work. Initially I had a problem since I was trying to get nix to install in my home directory and on the host (Dreamhost) that's actually a symlink, which nix doesn't allow. Then once I got it installed finally it didn't build - I can't remember the details exactly. I then tried to generate hc files for 6.6.1 to install that to bootstrap from, but I couldn't get ghc to build those on my machine - looking around it seems to have a lot of problems building on Leopard. My last resort is now to install Ubuntu in VMWare, install ghc, then generate the hc files on that, get those on my host, bootstrap from that, and then build 6.8.3 from source.

As an aside, is there any reason the tar of the hc files isn't available for download for versions that support it? It would make this a lot easier.

Cheers,
Colin