I found something in the nhc98's configure script that leads me to believe that there is a bug somewhere, I don't see the point in searching for it on my own as it is nothing big, just slightly annoying. When ./configure is run, the file nhc98-1.18/lib/ix86-linux/config is created, however make cannot be run because of the following message it will output, "*** missing separator.". I then checked what the file generated by ./configure contained and I found the problem. It contained: "... GHCSYM= 604 TRUE=/bin/true" Where ... represents other variables set before GHCSYM (none of those above had a problem). As you can see, there is a gap between GHCSYM= and the value of 604 which seems to belong to GHCSYM. So I changed it to GHCSYM=604 and then everything compiled and installed. nhc98 does execute from the terminal, I havn't tried compiling anything yet but I am sure it will compile things without a problem, I just thought I'd let you know about this problem with that file. Thanks.