Then I found Luigi Scarso's answer:
what about
$texmfstart texexec --luatex luatest1.tex
What is texmfstart? No idea, but "wer sucht, der findet"
$ locate texmfstart
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/scripts/context/ruby/texmfstart.rb
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/scripts/context/ruby/texmfstart.rb
I do remember having played with context ones, but I do not remember whether I installed context there. Anyway, the .rb extension is for ruby, so
ruby /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/scripts/context/ruby/texmfstart.rb texexec --luatex sheet06.tex
did what I wanted... mostly. It produces a .pdf but it looks very basic, the page numbers are on the top of the page, and so on. Well a good starting point nevertheless.
