"George N. White III"
Your ConTeXt example is using the default latin modern fonts. The reason the mpost files work with plain TeX is that the cm fonts are being used by plain tex, so the fonts are already defined in the .ps file when the font commands in the figure file are found.
That's 95% of the story, but I think with a small addendum. e.g. If the .tex file uses only cmr10 but fig.1 file uses cmsy7 for a subscript, dvips will handle it correctly and download cmsy7 into the .ps file. So it's not only that the fonts are defined in the .ps file, but that dvips knows how to handle the inclusion correctly when the font is listed in a fig.1 embedded by plain TeX.
For debian, the procedure for changing updmap.cnf has been debianized, but it is mentioned in the README for the lmodern package
Thanks, I didn't know about that. The directions are easy enough to do, esp. on an Ubuntu system. Though I prefer to use the vanilla system, so that I can test the distributions to see what works and breaks, and try to get the upstream folks to fix it. Although, I'm not sure who is the relevant upstream here. Mojca (off-list) suggested trying an older ConText and I'll try that. Meanwhile I'll put the 'dvips -Ppdf' workaround into my Makefiles. -Sanjoy `Not all those who wander are lost.' (J.R.R. Tolkien)