Only pdftex, no pdflatex or latex, available

[Mononofu]

Only using Ubuntu 10.04 (since the alpha releases, completely upgraded as of March 22)

As usually, I wanted to compile my .tex files using pdflatex. This time however, it spit out some errors and quit. I quickly discovered the reason: Both latex and pdflatex only start pdftex. This is not what I expected or wanted.

texlive-latex-base and texlive-latex-extra are installed.

[elrond (elrond.)]

Try to move your ~/.texmf-var. This worked for me

[Mononofu (j-schrittwieser-gmail)]

Did you move it somewhere specific or just rename the directory?

Just renaming didn't work for me :(

[elrond (elrond.)]

The command

$ pdflatex source.tex

gave this error:

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (TeX Live 2009/Debian)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
---! /home/<user>/.texmf-var/web2c/pdftex/pdflatex.fmt doesn't match pdftex.pool
(Fatal format file error; I'm stymied)

Just renaming ~/.texmf-var solved the problem (also renaming only ~/.texmf-var/web2c/pdftex/pdflatex.fmt and latex.fmt works).

Bug #543529 seems similar to this one, is this a duplicate?

[Mononofu (j-schrittwieser-gmail)]

Well, I believe not.
I get this error:

Running `LaTeX' on `file' with ``pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "\input" file.tex''
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (TeX Live 2009/Debian)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
pdflatex: fatal: Could not undump 1 4-byte item(s).

LaTeX exited abnormally with code 1 at Mon Apr 26 20:30:05

I have completely removed my .texmf-var directory, still no change :-(