Hi, As of about five minutes ago, there is a new beta of context available from pragma-ade. In that, Hans has improved the non-setuptex initialization even more, and it is now close enough to kpathsea that nobody should notice the difference in practise. Here is how it goes: * You still need the 'tex binaries' directory in the PATH. * Based on that, MKIV now always initializes the virtual variables $SELFAUTOLOC, $SELFAUTODIR and $SELFAUTOPARENT * If $TEXMFCNF is not set, the following default is used: '{$SELFAUTODIR,$SELFAUTOPARENT}{,{/share,}/texmf{-local,.local,}/web2c}' This is a tiny little bit different from texlive, but should not make a difference in practise. (The addition of .local is especially for gwtex, and we dropped $SELFAUTOLOC from this path) * MKIV now also pre-initializes $TEXOS == $SELFAUTODIR and $TEXROOT == $SELFAUTOPARENT as an extra service (and to allow you to mask the weird SELF... variable names from plain view in texmf.cnf) As noted already, MKII does not need those env vars anyway. Best wishes, Taco