Here is the bug report on launchpad. The cause of the bug is http redirects on sourceforge.org which are not handled properly by the installer.
The author of the report provides two workarounds with detailed walkthrough:
- The one is to cherrypick v3.6 from debian site as mentioned in other answers.
- The other is to manually download the required files from sourceforge with
wget which can handle the redirects nicely,
then run dpkg-reconfigure and specify the directory with the downloaded files when asked.
Make a temporary directory and download fonts:
mkdir /tmp/mscoref
cd /tmp/mscoref
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/{andale32.exe,arial32.exe,arialb32.exe,comic32.exe,courie32.exe,georgi32.exe,impact32.exe,times32.exe,trebuc32.exe,verdan32.exe,webdin32.exe}
then purge the failed package
sudo apt-get purge ttf-mscorefonts-installer
reinstall the package ignoring probable errors:
sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer
and finally:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure ttf-mscorefonts-installer
this will lead to this message:
Press enter; type the path to the downloaded files in the box (note: . does not work for me here):
and press enter again.
Now the fonts get installed smoothly:
....
Extracting cabinet: /tmp/mscoref/webdin32.exe
extracting fontinst.exe
extracting Webdings.TTF
extracting fontinst.inf
extracting Licen.TXT
All done, no errors.
All fonts downloaded and installed.
All credits should go to robingape from launchpad
