Missing Linux fonts

Question

Somehow I seem to have lost my system fonts, on Ubuntu 12.10 (I HAVE to use it) - while building some other development tools. (among them, libfontconfig and libfreetype because I was building Qt statically and needed them built static... maybe they are the culprits but I don't know how to undo it)

These are ALL the current fonts... I am obviously missing most fonts... I do not understand how. (ss from Impress, all apps show the same list)

So I try to install them... I don't know if the missing fonts can be installed using the following but it is the only thing i found.

either with

 sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
 sudo apt-get install --reinstall ttf-mscorefonts-installer

or the deb package

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+package/ttf-mscorefonts-installer

After the tricky part of accepting the EULA, I get the following

Preparing to unpack .../ttf-mscorefonts-installer_3.4ubuntu3_all.deb ...
mscorefonts-eula license has already been accepted
Unpacking ttf-mscorefonts-installer (3.4ubuntu3) over (3.4ubuntu3) ...
Processing triggers for fontconfig (2.10.1-0ubuntu3) ...
Processing triggers for update-notifier-common (0.126) ...
ttf-mscorefonts-installer: downloading http://downloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/andale32.exe
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/update-notifier/package-data-downloader", line 234, in process_download_requests
    dest_file = urllib.urlretrieve(files[i])[0]
 .......
IOError: [Errno socket error] [Errno 110] Connection timed out
Setting up ttf-mscorefonts-installer (3.4ubuntu3) ..

Seems like it didn't work

Is it possible to get the 'corefonts" ? or, even more important,

How can I get all the "typical" fonts back ?

sudo apt-get install --reinstall fontconfig

has no effect

Edit: The errors above show that the fonts cannot be downloaded ? But I can reach the page that fails to load, from the browser...

So I went there and downloaded them myself... but I don't know what to do with them because they are all "exe"

New edit I extracted the fonts - now I have ttf fonts - then double clicked on them and got a font viewer with an option to install. I pressed the install and got an error - with no explanation.

I tried to manually copy the ttf fonts in the folder they will likely end up - /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts

but nobody seems to care. The font viewer doesn't install them from there either and the msttcorefonts installer doesn't know that it does not need to install them from sourcefourge anymore... still fails same place.

Final Note: I found the place to copy the fonts manually so they can be found by all the programs that need them.

/usr/share/fonts/truetype/

(posted as an answer). The issues I had with installation and reaching repositories are to be resolved elsewhere.

Answer 1

Partial answer - not the best one:

I downloaded the fonts from http://downloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/ and placed them in a folder (~/Downloads/fonts)

decompressed them using cabextract

sudo cp -r ~/Downloads/fonts /usr/share/fonts/truetype/

all done.

Having some true type fonts was helpful... but not exactly the right thing, since my understanding now is that these fonts were not part of the basic install - and can create licensing issues if included.

The real answer:

The actual substitutions for Microsoft types fonts (what I called 'system fonts" in my question - part of the initial installation) - like "Liberation Sans" - are here: Liberation Fonts - finally found them.

Answer 2

These are parts of a bash script I wrote to put fonts in a new machine. Make sure you have the Canonical Partners repository active. Use dist-upgrade at your own risk. But if you don't know why, you don't need to worry about it :) If you do, use "upgrade" instead.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -v
#Requires user with sudo password

#Distribution upgrade
sudo apt-get update;
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y --fix-missing --fix-broken;

#Fonts are cool
#use "apt-get --install-suggests" instead of just "apt-get" if you are feeling manly, or just want to see if it helps.
sudo apt-get install fonts-cantarell lmodern ttf-aenigma ttf-georgewilliams ttf-bitstream-vera ttf-sjfonts ttf-tuffy tv-fonts
sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-font-meta

This tries to fix stuff, and then install a bunch of fonts. Give me some feedback. :)