I'm using xming and enabled x11 tunneling. But when I try to use emacs to get the GUI window. I do get the window, but no fonts, can't click on buttons like file, edit....and when I type anything I just get the black rectangles.

I get error msg in terminal....

"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

Any suggestions?



P.S. Im using vista Ultimate 64

Your .Xresources or similar is specifying a font for Emacs which doesn't exist on your system. You can switch to another font with the menu you get when you click the left mouse button while holding down the shift key; or try to run it with something like emacs -fn 6x10 for starters (that's fairly small but still legible IMHO). Once you can see what you are doing, you might want to find the place where you customize fonts ("faces" in Emacs parlance) to change it for good to something legible; or edit your .Xresources to specify a suitable font.

You can try xfontsel to see samples of available fonts but it's a bit of a dinosaur-era in terms of user interface. Each of the labels at the top is actually a menu where you can narrow down your choices. Pick a slant of r (that's roman / straight) and a wght of medium or light to exclude italic and bold fonts, and a suitable rgstry (ascii if you're comfortable with stone-age text without any international accents, iso8859 for some Western accents, iso10646 for full Unicode) and perhaps google a bit or read the manual page.

Just to add a bit to era's excellent distillation of how X11 font work (which I've now bookmarked for when I try and explain it to people thanks!) - the version of xming I use has a really small set of fonts by default, your's might well have the same problem.

There's good news though, you can add additional fonts to xming (like, say, courier-medium and helvetica-medium )
If you already have those fonts available in windows, you can either tell xming where to find these by editing the font-dirs file.
If they are not on your machine at all, you can either install them into windows, or into xming itself.
There's loads of information on xming fonts here:
Xming - PC X Server - Fonts