Fonts in X11 Emacs (21.3.1)

[Mika Fischer]

Hi!

I'm taking my first steps in Emacs so if anything I'm asking is stupid
and/or a FAQ please point me in the right direction.

I really can't stand the Courier font and would much rather use
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono or even the Fixed font of XFree86.

I tried to customize the default face and in the running session it
works. Also, this stuff gets written to my .emacs file:

(custom-set-faces
  ;; custom-set-faces was added by Custom -- don't edit or cut/paste it!
  ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
 '(default ((t (:slant normal :weight normal :height 110 :width normal
:family "fixed")))))

However, when I restart Emacs I have my ugly Courier back.

So some questions:
1) What is the preferred way of customizing faces?
   - M-x customize
   - Use .Xresources
   - Custom elisp code in .emacs
2) What fonts are you using in X11 Emacs?
3) How did you configure that?
4) Am I the only one who finds it strange that GNU Emacs looks a lot
   better on Windows than on a GNU system?

So if you have any hints helping me to make Emacs look acceptable in
X11 I'd be very grateful. At the moment I'm just using emacs -nw in an
xterm as that's much more readable...

TIA,
 Mika