Perry, 

Thanks for your help. I'm glad you were at least able to reproduce the problem. I'll try experimenting with removing things from my .emacs file to see if that makes a difference. 

BTW, sounds like our monitors display the grey a little differently. My second monitor is much lighter, but my macbook pro seems dark. The green or magenta text on a grey background is virtually unreadable. 

Warren

On Jan 24, 2011, at 3:12 PM, Perry Smith wrote:
> 
> I telnet'ed to a Unix system and then back to my laptop (Mac).
> Started Emacs -nw and it came up in the terminal.
> 
> I get the same list for list-color-display that you got.  I have a
> black menu with white text at the top.  My mode lines are black with
> white.  My normal text is black on white background.  The *scratch*
> butter starts with a "red" messages on white background.
> 
> All of these are muted slightly... the red is not full on and the
> write is very slightly grey.  But it sounds like your grey is darker.
> 
> My guess is the terminfo on Ubuntu is not exactly compatible with
> Mac's Terminal.app... but that seems rather unlikely.
> 
> My second guess is Ubuntu has modified emacs in this area but that
> also seems unlikely.
> 
> I don't know enough about how the colors and faces all interact or how
> to customize them.  Hopefully someone else on this list will pipe up.
> 
> You might try not using the daemon approach and, in particular, try
> starting without using your init file.  Perhaps there is something
> in there that is confusing things.
> 
> Sorry I can't be more help.
> 
> Perry
>