xterm crashing

[Mikhail T.]

Hello!

This is a newly installed XOrg-everything system. Everything seems to
work -- the entire KDE desktop, etc. However:

 % xterm
 open ttydev: Permission denied

What's with the ttydev?

Even worse, when I try to bring up one of the xterm's menues (Ctrl-Button{1,2, 
or 3}), I get:

 Warning: Unable to load any usable ISO8859 font
 Segmentation fault (core dumped)
 
Why are the requirements for font so strict, it can't find any despite:

 xlsfonts -fn '*8859*' | wc -l
     6147

Why is it crashing instead of switching to 'fixed'?

The above problems are on a native display. When I ssh-in from another
(running XFree86's X-server), the same xterm works fine -- no warnings
and the menus come up fine.

Any ideas? Thanks!

 -mi