Excerpts from Christian Himpel's message of Mo Aug 31 15:32:48 +0200 2009:
On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 15:22, Jan Spakula<jan.spakula@gmx.com> wrote:
Excerpts from Piyush P Kurur's message of Mo Aug 31 14:48:03 +0200 2009: It's possibly the issue that's come up on the forums: if you get something like: --- This is TeX, Version .... Fatal format file error; I'm stymied --- then you need to run 'updmap --all' (as the user you get this error with). Alternatively, you can delete the user's local texlive generated formats 'rm ~/.texlive/texmf-var/web2c/*.fmt' (then the system-wide generated formats will be used, and they do get regenerated automatically on upgrade).
i think it's 'fmtutil --all' instead of 'updmap --all'. you could also run 'fmtutil-sys --all' as root to recreate the system-wide format files.
Eh, of course it's fmtutil. Sorry. However the point is that 'fmtutil-sys --all' *does* get run automatically on texlive upgrade, but if the user has generated the formats themselves at some point, these formats are preferred by texlive regardless of system changes. So the user need to regenerate or delete the local format files.