Another dense post - I would apologise, but if you don’t know what the title means, you wouldn’t be interested in what the post says. When persuading Matplotlib to render its text using TeX on Ubuntu 10.4 (useTex=true), you may find that:

the base texlive install does not ship with the type1cm package. You may need to install some of the extra packages to get all the goodies that come bundled with other latex distributions.

But being specific about those “some packages” could be helpful - and this worked for me:

sudo aptitude install texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-fonts-extra