Did I accept the ttf-mscorefonts-installer EULA?
No you didn't accept the EULA. And no, you don't have the fonts installed, but yes, you've installed the package.
I understand that's confusing. Let me explain that.
The actual accept/reject value is written to the debconf database. It is independent of the package installation. The post-install script of the package is responsible for the fonts to be installed and prevents it if you don't accept the EULA.
To check what the value is in the debconf database, install debconf-utils , then do
$ sudo debconf-get-selections | grep 'msttcorefonts/accepted-mscorefonts-eula'
ttf-mscorefonts-installer msttcorefonts/accepted-mscorefonts-eula boolean true
This is true for my machine, because I did accept it. For you this should be probably false.
Even if you installed the package but you did not accept the EULA, then the fonts aren't installed. Why? Because the package does not contain the font files. It downloads the fonts from an external website due to license restrictions in distribution. To prove, see the contents of the package:
$ dpkg -L ttf-mscorefonts-installer
/.
/var
/var/lib
/var/lib/msttcorefonts
/usr
/usr/share
/usr/share/fonts
/usr/share/fonts/truetype
/usr/share/package-data-downloads
/usr/share/package-data-downloads/ttf-mscorefonts-installer
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/ttf-mscorefonts-installer
/usr/share/doc/ttf-mscorefonts-installer/README.Debian
/usr/share/doc/ttf-mscorefonts-installer/copyright
/usr/share/doc/ttf-mscorefonts-installer/changelog.gz
/usr/share/lintian
/usr/share/lintian/overrides
/usr/share/lintian/overrides/ttf-mscorefonts-installer
/usr/lib
/usr/lib/msttcorefonts
/usr/lib/msttcorefonts/update-ms-fonts
and that's why it's called an installer. This is ugly and totally non-standard packaging. Developers are forced to do this, because of the aforementioned licence restrictions. A similar workaround for this has been developed for Flash, packaged as flashplugin-installer .
After installation of the package the postinstall script, located at /var/lib/dpkg/info/ttf-mscorefonts-installer.postinst, will download and install the fonts only if the license is accepted (asked in the preinstall script). It uses the /usr/lib/msttcorefonts/update-ms-fonts application (which is part of the package) to perform the actual download and installation. Have a look at the scripts yourself; they're not rocket science at all.
With installing ubuntu-restricted-extras you will also install the package ttf-mscorefonts-installer
. This package is responsible for installing restricted MS fonts.
Whenever we disagree with the Microsoft EULA by not accepting it it will not install these fonts. We can easily check this by searching for all installed font packages:
fc-list
No Microsoft fonts (e.g. Arial) will be listed after we had not agreed to the EULA (and we had not manually installed an MS font by other means).
In case we want to also remove the font installer we can safely do so with
sudo apt-get purge ttf-mscorefonts-installer
Watch out for packages that depend on the mscorefonts and may then also be removed.