+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #29499 +++ On a simple hello.tex like this: \documentclass{article} \begin{document} Hello, world! \end{document} xelatex and luatex crash because they were compiled with an older zlib (I found the description of the reason somewhere on the web, in a mailing list): $ xelatex hello.tex This is XeTeXk, Version 3.1415926-2.2-0.999.6 (Web2C 7.5.7) %&-line parsing enabled. (Fatal format file error; I'm stymied) $ luatex hello.tex PANIC: unprotected error in call to Lua API (zlib library version does not match - header: 1.2.7, library: 1.2.8) $ rpm -qf /usr/bin/xelatex /usr/bin/luatex texlive-xetex-2008.0-alt0.15.5 texlive-base-bin-2008.0-alt0.15.5 $ rpm -q zlib zlib-1.2.8-alt1 $ To avoid such errors, an explicit dependcy on the version of zlib should be set in the RPM package. (For them to work, they should be rebuilt now, anyway.)