I had a problem a while back with a Word document needs the Verdana font, and I didn’t have it installed on my machine. A quick search revealed an easy package to install for Ubuntu. I found some more complicated instructions for Fedora. It looks like they were repeated here, but I found a better solution futher on down.
For some reason, I could not figure out where the rpmbuild directory was supposed to come from. Then, I found this article that was very helpful:
Mauriat Miranda:Personal Fedora 15 Installation Guide — Install Microsoft Truetype Fonts
I just downloaded his msttcore-fonts-2.0-3.noarch.rpm and ran:
sudo rpm -ivh ~/Downloads/msttcore-fonts-2.0-3.noarch.rpm
Note: I just peaked in my currently installed Ubuntu, and I do see Verdana listed in LibreOffice Writer. So, I think it installs by default for Ubuntu.