I installed Debian just last night (coming from Redhat) and I'm impressed with it so far. One trouble though: I installed latex and related tex packages, but when I run latex I get "can't find default format file". AFAIK this indicates the kpathsea path information wasn't set up correctly. The configuration succeeded as far as I can tell. I looked for the texhash script but couldn't find it.
I don't have any tex-related environment variables set, and since I'm running this right out of the box I'm a little surprised it's not configured properly. How do I fix this? Any hints appreciated. Thanks, -Tom