[XeTeX] XeTeX on Linux: TFM files not found and Type1 fonts not embedded

[Firmicus]

Dear all,

Since I learned that XeTeX has been released for Linux I have been using 
it with great enthusiasm. My thanks to Jonathan Kew for his wonderful work!

Now I can typeset critical editions of Arabic texts (using ednotes and 
my own package bidi.sty which is extracted and adapted from rlbabel.def) 
in ways that were never truly possible with ArabTeX or even Omega/Aleph. 
More on this topic in a forthcoming message...

For the time being I just want to plainly report of a few basic problems 
I am encountering and for which I have no solution.

1. XeTeX systematically fails to load tfm files, even though "kpsewhich 
-progname=xetex cmsy10.tfm" for instance does point to the correct path. 
Whenever TeX metric files are needed I have to circumvent this by 
creating symlinks in the working directory that point to the needed TFMs.

2. When using TeX fonts (mostly for math symbols), xetex, or rather 
xdvipdfmx, generates bitmaps from metafont instead of embedding the 
Type1 version which is actually available to dvips, pdflatex and 
dvipdfm(x). (The output of "kpsewhich -progname=xdvipdfmx t1fonts.map" 
on my system is  
/opt/texlive2005/texmf-var/fonts/map/dvipdfm/updmap/t1fonts.map.) I have 
tried to run xelatex with option -no-pdf to produce the xdv and then run 
xdvipdfmx with option -f pointing to the above mapfile, but to no avail: 
the resulting pdf still contains bitmaps as before. Note that no such 
problem occurs on my system with dvips, dvipdfm or pdflatex.

Can anyone running XeTeX on Linux confirm the above two problems?

Thanks,
François Charette