Xelatex complains that lmodern fonts are not installed

Please see the latest activities on the Debian bugtracker [1]. The Latin Modern fonts are the default fonts for Xetex and should therefore be automatically installed (as dependeny) when you install the ‘texlive-xetex’ package.

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1. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=576599

I’m also affected by this bug. Maybe this is not necessary since the bug report in the Debian bugtracker explains everything, but when I tried to compile the following LaTeX file with xelatex for example:

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xltxtra}
\usepackage{xunicode}

\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Linux Libertine O}

\title{Bla}
\author{Alexander}
\date{\today}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

Hello.

\end{document}

I received the following error message:

alexander@prudentia:~/Documents/LaTeX$ xelatex bla.tex
This is XeTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.2-0.9995.2 (TeX Live 2009/Debian)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(./bla.tex
LaTeX2e <2009/09/24>
Babel <v3.8l> and hyphenation patterns for english, usenglishmax, dumylang, noh
yphenation, loaded.
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2007/10/19 v1.4h Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/xelatex/fontspec/fontspec.sty
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/generic/ifxetex/ifxetex.sty)
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/tools/calc.sty)
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/xkeyval/xkeyval.sty
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/generic/xkeyval/xkeyval.tex
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/generic/xkeyval/keyval.tex)))
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/base/fontenc.sty
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/xelatex/euenc/eu1enc.def)
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/xelatex/euenc/eu1lmr.fd)kpathsea: Invalid fontname `[lmroman10-regular]', contains '['

! Font EU1/lmr/m/n/10=[lmroman10-regular]:mapping=tex-text at 10.0pt not loadab
le: Metric (TFM) file or installed font not found.
<to be read again>
                   relax
l.100 \fontencoding\encodingdefault\selectfont

Installing the lmodern package fixed it as expected. I never intend to use the Latin Modern fonts anyway, so if there’s a solution to fix this bug without adding the lmodern package as a dependency that’s fine with me. However, they do seem to be the default for XeTeX as can be read in comment #42 in the Debian bug tracker.

Apparently, the Debian packager decided to add lmodern as a recommends to the texlive-xetex package today. I’m not sure what the way of doing things in Ubuntu is, but hopefully Ubuntu could copy over Debian’s changes to the package before Ubuntu Lucid is released, or at least as an update ASAP (assuming here that the Ubuntu package is based on the Debian package)? The fix seems quite trivial and it will prevent that novice LaTeX users who don’t know how to fix this will encounter this problem.

I am also affect by this bug. The only way to solve it is to install the lmodern package, which is 17MB in size!

Using 14.04 and lmodern is still not in the dependencies list.
I am using xeCJK and this it successfully compiled after installing lmodern.
\usepackage{xeCJK}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setCJKmainfont{....}

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.