I've got 256 colors working great in my terminal (test scripts here), but it stops working when I use ncurses (via Ruby-ncurses). Printing the escape sequences given on that page works fine, but when I initialize ncurses 'puts' stops working and I can't output the colors with any of the various ncurses color changing/string output functions I've found. What gives?
njsf: You were partially right here, and after tinkering a lot more I eventually got it to work. Thanks for your help. The story: XTerm (and rxvt, and Eterm) support 256 colors via escape sequences (what I was seeing) but 'tput colors' will say '8' and ncurses won't be able to get at them, because ncurses is playing nice and attempting to access via terminfo.
For the benefit of anyone with similar pain:
I found I need to install the ncurses-term (Ubuntu) package to get /lib/terminfo/x/xterm-256color and other 256-color terminfo files. Then I set my TERM to xterm-256color and added the line '*customization: -color' to my ~/.Xdefaults, ran 'xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults' to load it, and from then on I have proper 256 color support in new xterms.