The upgrading of Context or even of pdftex is sufficiently failure prone that I have given up trying.
I tend to agree. I follow the meager instructions I have found, as well as some direct help from hh himself and am still not able to get it working right. I think the problem is with hacked engine support. I try disabling the use of engine but I still get the same problem. At this point I am tracking down a weird error in texexec.pl in which kpsewhich returns a null result and TEXFORMATS gets set to '0'. This wreaks havoc and breaks everything. I suspect texlive texmf.cnf settings trigger a bug in texexec. Perhaps everything would work just fine with the limited linux tex distribution from pragma. But I, like many others, prefer to use texlive because it is fairly comprehensive and I can use my normal latex and friends. I think it would be a very useful exercise for hh to install a complete texlive on a stock fedora box. Then write down _every_ step necessary to get beta cont-tmf.zip installed and working. I would think that targeting texlive as the standard platform for distributing context on linux/unix would make the most sense. It should _not_ be necessary to make anything but a trivial change to texmf.cnf. sc