This is worth a quick mention in case someone runs into the same issue. If you get this when trying to make a .tex file:

IEEEtran.cls:366: leading text: normalfont
IEEEtran.cls:724: Font OT1/ptm/m/n/5=ptmr7t at 5.0pt not loadable: Metric (TFM)

Then install the recommended fonts to fix the problem:

§ sudo apt-get install texlive-fonts-recommended

This took me way longer to figure out than it should have.