fatal font problem with emacs

[BillJosephson]

Hello, when I run emacs on my linux box, it opens with nonsense
characters. I get the following std errors:

> emacs markers
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 have no idea how to proceed to get emacs working. I'm running suse
10.1 on an IBM Intellistation A Pro.

Thanks very much for any help at all.