I am running emacs 22 inside a classic xterm 'xterm -fg yellow -bg black' with a huge font; big old klunky xterm that is easy for a blind man to read on a 19 inch LCD monitor. Knoppix 5.3.1 is running off the DVD entirely in memory and I must save this file off the ramdisk to something non volitile such as a USB stick. I can read the NTFS filesystem that has Vista on it but I don't think I could write to it.
I was able to write directly to the NTFS filesystem but somehow the filename got changed to Bruce. I had created it as the file '090817' with no file extension. I will see if I can write that file there. Knoppix was designed for a sys admin to be able to rescue Windows disks where Windows was crashed. It just said it wrote to the new file on /media/sda1/Users/Bruce/090817, or my Vista home directory.
I was able to cat the files off the NTFS filesystem, amd emacs remembered the file I had created even after I quit emacs. Of course it could be using only the autosave file on the ramdisk. I will save this file and see where it saves it.
And now the acid test is to examine and change the file on Vista. I opted for the Cygwin console, which runs bash, and emacs -nv inside to make corrections to the file. (08/17/2009)
A problem I forgot about is that emacs -nw on cygwin doesn't accept the C-X C-C exit sequence. Control-C rings the bell, but doesn't quit emacs. ( Yes, I know that C-G is the ASCII bell, but C-C here does the same.)
The sequence C-X C-Z is an alternative since it backgrounds the emacs session and one could just kill it from the shell.
I should really learn how to use the menus on the consoled version. I haven't checked if this is a problem on a true xterm started out of Xwin, the rootless X11 window manager for Windows.
Emacs -nw doesn't seem to use the Menu Bar in any obvious way.
I wanted to test with an xterm but the shortcut went away. For some bizarre reason the cygwin I got put shortcuts on the desktop that start this numerical integration program called Singular in emacs and in an xterm, so to get around that I must have clobbered the shortcut. So, now I am using another program in the Program Menu that starts a different console that runs a bash shell that is not an xterm but does allow emacs to use its ordinary exit sequence with 'emacs -nw'. The downside is that now the font size is smaller and I haven't figured out yet if I can change that or how to. On the other hand the background color is this beautiful dark navy blue, and the foreground text is a wheat yellow. This is quite pleasent, now only if I could make the font larger.
This client is called rxvt, and from the decorations it is a native windows console. One way to test that is to save this and try running an X11 command from the shell, maybe an xterm :-) But it failed the the "can't open display" message you'd expect if ther were no X11 window manager running.
I found the solution to the xterm problem. The old Singular desktop shortcut that I clobbered is now replaced by one that points to the Xserver, Xwin, which like every Xserver is designed to fork an xterm at least. Now I have to figure out how to tell it that I want an xterm with a certian sized font and colors. Just for grins I will see if I can fork a third xterm with the pretty colors I saw in the rxvt native windows client.
It was easy to get close: 'xterm -bg navy -fg wheat' but I couldn't find the darker blue or a correct font name for the Huge font in the menu that I can set once the xterm is forked. So, I am running the Xwin WM, the small white xterm with green letters, a yellow on black xterm and this wheat on navy one. I will have to see if I can find a name for the color that matches the darker blue. This is more the color of the deep open ocean than that.
I had to actually tweek the individual RGB values to get much closer and the following seems to be a good aproximation of the desired colors:
xterm -fg wheat -bg rgb:0/0/4 &
The parent was the one cited above.
There were four xterms running with different colors. I should try to set up my own list of x-clients to be forked by the server.
I still haven't figured out the memu bar for emacs -nw.
The mouse does not reposition the emacs cursor. I do recall that it did on some other systems. It doesn't in this xterm. sp maybe that is something I saw on Mac OS.