Pablo Rodriguez
Carlos, I’m afraid I don’t get what your actual problem is.
Could you describe it with a single sentence? I mean the problem itself, not your actions to fix it.
Excuse me, but I’m not sure whether you have an issue with the fonts, with the cache, with TeX Live or wit the Ubuntu packages.
Pablo
Pablo, simply put, the system fonts, with the module simplefonts, can't be found. Was OSFONTDIR exported? Yes. Was the path specified correctly? Yes. In my case was /usr/share/fonts What command was used afterward? The mtxrun --script fonts --reload. Did you try other commands? Yes. Most notably context --generate, context --make, luatools. When was the first time the condition appeared? Some time last week, after reading complaints from other computer users, who think texlive as it's currently distributed, is disrespectful to users, e.g. most people would not need every other package out there. (Of course, the above is just not correct). But the other most readily option, is to install the packaged distribution for ubuntu. The latter is what I did. Thank you Pablo.