Emacs In 11.0-rc

I have installed rc1 on my eeepc. It was a PITA to get the right ethernet drivers (is there a reason why openSUSE doesn't include the atl2.ko module; all other distros appear to have it?), but after that, it looks absolutely gorgeous. My only serious complaint: emacs uses tiny tiny fonts (completely unreadable). I can change them via the "Options" menu, but can't make them stick via .emacs configuration. The bizarre thing is: I have compiled the cvs version of xft emacs to have antialiased fonts. It works beautifully on 10.3 (and other linux distros), but in 11.0, I get the same tiny fonts as in "regular" emacs, even if I start this emacs with the --font="SOME_FONT-12" switch. Since this emacs is compiled from source, I suspect this must be a SuSE 11.0 problem. Any thoughts on this?

pindar