It works if you use this script: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gaburici/setup-tl
No need to move anything aside. Feel free to include the script it in TL :)
On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 11:17 PM, Karl Berry
My solution was to drop the pdftex binary I've compiled in /usr/local/bin
Please don't expect a random TeX binary to work with a random TeX tree.
If you want to use TL'08, install TL'08. If you have TL'08 installed /some/where, then put your new pdftex into its tree: /some/where/bin/i386-linux/pdftex (move the original aside, of course).
Your original message was about .fmt file mismatches. Delete your .fmt files created with previous versions of TL'08 and let them be recreated. We had to make changes that changed the .fmt's during the last round of bug fixes.
Hope this helps.
karl