[NTG-context] Fatal format file error; I'm stymied

[Ernesto Schirmacher]

After many years as a LaTeX user I'm attempting to switch over to ConTeXt.  

I recently upgraded my operating system to Ubuntu 7.10 (on an AMD64 machine) and got the TeXLive and ConTeXt packages from the Ubuntu repositories.  I tried compiling a very simple document:

\starttext

Hello this is \ConTeXt.

\stoptext

using the command: texexec simple.tex and got the following output on my terminal:

TeXExec | processing document 'simple.tex'
TeXExec | no ctx file found
TeXExec | tex processing method: context
TeXExec | TeX run 1
TeXExec | writing option file simple.top
TeXExec | using randomseed 898
TeXExec | tex engine: pdftex
TeXExec | tex format: cont-en
This is pdfTeXk, Version 3.141592-1.40.3 (Web2C 7.5.6)
%$-line parsing enabled.
(/usr/share/texmf/web2c/natural.tcx)
---! cont-en.fmt was written by pdfetex
(Fatal format file error; I'm stymied)
TeXExec | runtime: 0.177424


Clearly something is not working properly and I suspect the incompatibility between 
   This is pdfTeXk...
and
   ---! cont-en.fmt was written by pdfetex 
is the source of all trouble here.

Could someone please point me in the right direction to resolve this?

Thanks in advance, 

Ernesto