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There are debug options in kpathsea but in the end I didn't need them. After I installed TeXLive I had set an environment variable TEXMF to /usr/local/texlive/2008/texmf, just for convenience and to save typing. This didn't conflict with any of the environment variables listed in the installation ...

Thanks for the welcome. I should have said a bit more. I am running Debian Lenny. I have used tetex before but this time I installed from the CD. The installation seemed to go well and I chose all the defaults. The format file tex.fmt exists in
/usr/local/texlive/2008/texmf-var/web2c/tex/tex.fmt ...

I used TeX a lot in the past and I am just about to start using it again. I got the TeXLive 2008 CD and installed it but I can't get it to work. The error message from a minimal plain TeX compilation is

kpathsea: Running mktexfmt tex.fmt
I can't find the format file `tex.fmt'!

It looks like a ...