This is Back Track Linux booted off the Linux Bible DVD, 2008 edition. It is quite attractive in KDE with a transparent terminal. The editor is vi, no emacs installed. The ramdisk takes up about half of the available ram, about 1.5 GB and the harddisk partitions are mounted.
This looks like a rescue and security distro, but smaller than knoppix.
The harddisk partitions are mounted read only, use 'mount'. and so I probably can't save this file to them without remounting them rw. I am logged in as root, so I could do that, but I'll probably just use a stick.
One thing I'd like to do is to build a distro that runs off a DVD-RW which saves any changes at shutdown. One could start with a base distro, add packages, edit files, and save snapshots of changes to files on the media. At the next boot it would restore those changes to the ramdisk image. The trick is to have enough ram to make using apps comfortable, and then to save the changes in shutdown scripts.
I could take a distro like this, add my favorite packages, such as emacs, here, save the modified distro to DVD-RW, reboot, change some files and save the changes back to the dvd as compressed tarfiles with a date stamp. At reboot either restore the latest change or allow to restore a snapshot.