Thanks! Seems, that this was the (same) reason.  
I think I have now working minimals  2010.11.12 18:22

Kind regards
Erik

2010/11/14 Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>
On Sat, 13 Nov 2010, Erik Margraf wrote:

I get the following error message while running first-setup.sh:
------------
! I can't find file `catc-ini.mkiv'.
<to be read again>
                 \relax
l.42 \loadmarkfile{catc-ini}
-----------

Strange enough, I find it as
 ..../tex/texmf-context/tex/context/base/catc-ini.mkiv

Anything I can do about that?

I had the same error. I am on linux-64 and the luatex binary in linux-64/bin did not have the execute permission set. So the wrong luatex was being used.

But I use mtx-update directly, so do not know if this is the same reason for the error in the minimals.

Aditya