X11 Fonts in Recent Ubuntu Releases

Opening X11 windows such as emacs from remote machines fail to display fonts in recent versions of Ubuntu. This may be fixed by installing the x11 font packages:

xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi

Unfortunately currently apt doesn't update the font path, so you need to do so manually:

xset +fp /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi:unscaled
xset +fp /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi:unscaled
xset fp+ /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi
xset fp+ /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi
xset fp rehash

Taken from the ubuntu forums here.