cannot install texlive fonts in 18.04

I installed from scratch lubuntu 18.04.1 on my 32-bit netbook (previously running lubuntu 16.04). The installation went well and I was able to reboot the machines and installed other (non-tex-related) softwares. But when I tried to install texlive-latex I got massive errors. Eventually I tracked down the problem to a single package, fonts-lmodern. I used synaptic to purge all texlive related packages and then installed fonts-lmodern to isolate this one error message:

W: Failed to fetch http://ftp.utexas.edu/ubuntu/pool/main/l/lmodern/fonts-lmodern_2.004.5-3_all.deb
  Connection failed [IP: 146.6.15.16 80]

I posted this question in the "answers" sections of launchpad and eventually got help resolving this problem:

  https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/texlive-extra/+question/677188

Solution: edit /etc/apt/source.list by replacing all the http by https

Note: (1) I ran into this problem with multiple texlive fonts; fonts-lmodern just happened to be the first one synaptic complained about.

(2) These fonts packages (over 40 of them) are installed as part of texlive-latex-base; until I edited source.list as described above I was not able to install latex. Presumably that is an important tool for many people (certainly for me) so I report the bug (?) here, even though the answer section already resolves the issue.

(3) I ran into this same issue in linux mint 19.1 xfce on a 64bit laptop. Mint's has a different repo setup and I have not yet figured out how to fix this. I also know that launchpad is not responsible for mint. I mention this solely to point out that (I believe) this is not a "32 bit issue".

THANKS!