CentOS - Oct 2009 - on emacs startup no fonts, just little empty boxes

Just upgraded CentOS to (uname) "Linux 2.6.18-164.2.1.el5.plus #1 SMP
Fri Oct 9 12:34:43 EDT 2009 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux" and since then,
when emacs (version 21.4.1) starts up (using emacs -Q), where there
should be text there are only little empty boxes, each the size of
character.  The error message reads:

Warning: Cannot convert string
"-*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*" to type FontStruct
Warning: Cannot convert string
"-*-helvetica-medium-r-*--*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1" to type FontStruct

I've tried running "emacs --font <font-spec>" with different
font specs,
but all of them error'd out also.

"fc-list" shows 156 fonts available... you'd think emacs would be
able
to grab one of them and be happy with it.

What's emacs doing or trying to do?

Anybody have a 5.4 issue with fonts?

tia for any help.

-- 
War is a failure of the imagination.
        --William Blake

On 10/26/2009 05:44 AM ken wrote:
> Just upgraded CentOS to (uname) "Linux 2.6.18-164.2.1.el5.plus #1 SMP
> Fri Oct 9 12:34:43 EDT 2009 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux" and since then,
> when emacs (version 21.4.1) starts up (using emacs -Q), where there
> should be text there are only little empty boxes, each the size of
> character.  The error message reads:
> 
> Warning: Cannot convert string
> "-*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*" to type
FontStruct
> Warning: Cannot convert string
> "-*-helvetica-medium-r-*--*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1" to type
FontStruct
> 
> I've tried running "emacs --font <font-spec>" with
different font specs,
> but all of them error'd out also.
> 
> "fc-list" shows 156 fonts available... you'd think emacs
would be able
> to grab one of them and be happy with it.
> 
> What's emacs doing or trying to do?
> 
> Anybody have a 5.4 issue with fonts?
> 
> tia for any help.
> 
Thanks for the assistance.  :P  I couldn't solve the problem, so I
solved the problem by reviving an emacs 23.1.1 that I compiled myself
some months back.  And after all the diddling I did with the Fontconfig
subsystem, the fonts I'm seeing now are much more pleasant than what I
was getting with it before.  So it (the 23.1.1 version) must be using
the newer font subsystem while the 21.4.1 version (installed via yum
with the 5.4 upgrade) is using the core X stuff (which I haven't yet dug
into).  If anyone can disagree, how does one come to know?

One other point of weirdness: when I did "rpm -e emacs" (twice), it
hung
(didn't do anything and didn't give me back the bash prompt until I
killed it (-9).  The same thing happens when I use "yum remove emacs".

Why should it be impossible to remove a package?