What's up with gnome-terminal?

[Rem P Roberti]

Still no joy trying to get gnome-terminal to work. Now when I try to
load it I get this error message:

**
ERROR:terminal-app.c:1445:terminal_app_init: assertion failed:
(app->system_font_desc != NULL)
Abort trap: 6 (core dumped)

Funny thing is that a year or so ago I used to use gnome-terminal on
another installation with no problems.  Did something change?

Rem