No colours in your file listings ?

Something I do on every new Linux installation I do, is an alias for ls. First, let's explain how to use the alias command, available at least with bash and tcsh. Alias will put a table in memory, and when you type a command that matches, it will execute what you've specified instead. There's a command for this in DOS too, but I can't remember right now. alias ls="ls --color" will do the right thing in bash, I think alias ls "ls --color" is the correct syntax for tcsh, but not sure there. You can do a lot of things with alias..

Of course, you don't want to type alias ls="ls --color" every time you log on, so a good idea is to put the command in the file .bash_profile in your home directory. That way it'll be done every time you log on.