Hi Everyone, Just to report that I now have Haskell Platform built for CentOS 5.2 with a /tmp mounted noexec. Looking back, the first main hurdle was getting GHC built for CentOS 5.2 (which uses Linux 2.6.9/glibc 2.5), but the procedure was pretty straight forward: . Keep trying generic binary Linux ghc packages until one that works is found (in this case ghc-6.8.3); . With ghc-6.8.3 installed, download the src tar ball for the next ghc release (6.10.1) and build and install that; . With the newly built GHC on the PATH, rinse and repeat until ghc-6.12.1 installed. It took a fair bit of time but, as far as I can tell, every single build worked flawlessly. My next task was getting cabal-install to work, which nearly defeated me, but it turns out that because CentOS mounts /tmp noexec, so all I had to do was get cabal-install to use somewhere else. As I was pithily advised: alias cabal="TMPDIR=/foo cabal" With that in place, AFAIK, the Haskell Platform built from source with the various configure scripts giving me enough hints to 'yum install' all the required CentOS packages. Thanks to everyone for their help. Chris