So on install from source, ran into an issue with TPM. Initially, trousers failed to install properly (leading to failure when trying to configure TPM), but rebooting/reinstalling trousers seemed to work.
However, trousers fails to set TPM permissions in Ubuntu. This is apparently a known issue from 2013 (Ubuntu issue #963587).
The fix is, in theory, pretty simple, just add permissions to the relevant directories via command line: sudo chown tss:tss /dev/tpm* && sudo chown -R tss:tss /var/lib/tpm
...but of course only works if you have TPM enabled already.
Apr 1 13:27:26: Connecting to local tcsd
Apr 1 13:27:26: Attempting to create NVRAM index 25