Taco Hoekwater wrote:
The binaries should go in a 'normal' TeX binary folder
like texmf/bin or texmf-win32/bin so that they can find
your texmf.cnf automatically. If you put them elsewhere,
you have to set the TEXMFCNF environment variable.

There is no pool file, so you do not have to worry about that.
  
    Hopefully this I'm not doing something too obviously wrong here, but I'm getting the following error trying to build a LaTeX format.

 ./luatex -ini /usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex/base/latex.ltx
...
...
! Text line contains an invalid utf-8 sequence.
l.7801   \uccode`\=`\
                       Ð % d-bar

I'm able to build the format for Plain TeX working without any problems though. 

-- 
[Geoff Washburn|geoffw@cis.upenn.edu|http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~geoffw/]