ack!  needed to do some updates on some graphics for a website.

fired up gIMP and I was like wtf? “where is Arial, where is Verdana?!?!”

Turns out these are not installed by default.  Fire up Synaptic (system, administration, synaptic package manager … or from a term window : sudo synaptic& )

search for msttcorefonts, right click, install, apply

or all CLI:   sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

This will prompt you about  needing to configure X properly, but you can just lick OK or whatever and let it install.