I've done the following steps on two different machines (both running Gentoo Linux) for installing ConTeXt minimals.

> mkdir /opt/context

> cd /opt/context
> rsync -av rsync://contextgarden.net/minimals/setup/first-setup.sh .

> ./first-setup.sh

> cd <working directory for foo.tex>
> . /opt/context/tex/setuptex

> context foo.tex

There seems to be problems with ConTeXt finding fonts.  The output from the `context foo.tex` run(s) is below:

Troy

--

> context foo.tex

fonts           > !! No bodyfont has been defined and no defaults have been
fonts           > !! loaded (maybe due to a missing \starttext).