To be able to use windows fonts like Verdana, Tahoma and so forth in Latex documents on an Ubuntu Jaunty Jackelope you need to install the winfonts package from CTAN. The following steps explains what I undertook to use these fonts:
1. First download the winfonts package from CTAN
2. Find your Tahoma and/or Verdana fonts on the web or your Windows computer
3. Extract the files in your home
4. Copy the contents of the winfonts directories doc, fonts, tex, ttf2tfm to /usr/share/texmf-texlive/ respectively
5. Copy the fonts to /usr/share/texmf-texlive/fonts/truetype/public/msttcorefonts
6. Run the following commands
sudo update-texmf sudo update-fmtutil sudo update-updmap sudo texhash sudo updmap-sys --enable MixedMap winfonts.map
7. In your LaTeX document switch to Tahoma with the following commands:
usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
fontfamily{tahoma}selectfont
renewcommand{sfdefault}{tahoma}
renewcommand{familydefault}{sfdefault}
I solved this problem with some help from these entries:
http://www.latex-community.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2110&p=8558
Further the documentation for the winfonts is here.