Yes, I had done that, but that only uncovers the texmf tree - stuff that goes into /usr/share/texmf on my desktop. Where is the stuff that goes into /usr/bin?
I had downloaded all the listed tetex ipks, expanded them using ar, unpacked each data.tar.gz, and dug through for anything that looks like a binary (234 MB of stuff). No luck. If I do something like "find . -name latex", all I get are the directory names in /usr/share/texmf/tex, .../doc, and the font directories.
So I must repeat my question: what ipk contains /usr/bin/tex, /usr/bin/latex, etc.?
Thanks, and sorry to be a pain, but I'm assuming someone is running tex successfully, otherwise it would make no sense to have only the very large texmf tree.
Mike