Hello, you are probably all aware of the recent brouhaha relative to virtualisation, that is to say the possibility of running multiple operating systems in parallel on the same PC (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualisation). This opens all kind of interesting possibilities, in particular for software distribution. Rather then having to worry about creating and maintaining different versions of a program for Windows + the infinite variations of Linux/Unix one could simply distribute a stand-alone virtual machine including the kernel of the OS of choice plus the application (this naturally only applies to applications with a network interface, e.g. web-based applications). This would have significant advantages in terms of ease of installation, safety, manageability and possibly also efficiency of execution as the underlying OS could be fine-tuned to support the application in an optimal way. This new trend might also be good news for Haskell as, coupled with a free OS with a small footprint, it might be used to create network applications that are both powerful and easy-to-install and manage. Since the question: what is the smallest X86 OS core on top of which one might compile Haskell (and I am mainly thinking of GHC Haskell here) programs? And: has anyone already built a 'haskell-in-a-box' virtual machine? Regards, titto ------------------------- Pasqualino "Titto" Assini E-mail: titto@quicquid.org Skype: tittoassini MSN : titto@kamus.it