[tex-live] $TEXMFHOME not working right

[Joel C. Salomon]

I have a net install of TL ’09 on my Ubuntu machine, installed for the
whole machine (so I run tlmgr under sudo).  I’m trying to install some
packages in $TEXMFHOME, but they are not being found.  Running mktexlsr,
either as root or not, does not update that tree, so I tried doing it
explicitly:

chesky at derrial:~$ mktexlsr --verbose `kpsewhich --expand-var='$TEXMFHOME'`
mktexlsr: Updating /home/chesky/texmf/ls-R...
mktexlsr: Done.

The ls-R file is created, but .sty files are still not found for
typesetting.

I looked for an option in tlmgr for $TEXMFHOME (I vaguely recall such an
option in the installer?) but could not find it.

Is there a configuration file to edit to fix this?

—Joel Salomon