Problems with bold colour display in text mode

[Jim Holland <mc mango zw>]

Hi

Lack of bold colours is a problem that I have come across with a number of
recent Linux distributions, including RHEL clones, Fedora Core 4, etc.  
When using text mode tools such as Midnight Commander (which I put at the
very top of the list of essential utilities to administer a server), I
cannot get bold colours to work.  So bold red and bold yellow come out
looking a sort of murky brown, and highlighted files really don't show up
properly.  With FC4 I did manage to get some (but not all colours) to work
in bold on the command line when I did a GUI install, but for server use I
would prefer to have a totally text-based installation.

I have experimented with different motherboards and different display 
cards, but always find this problem affects command line applications with 
these recent Linux distributions.

This is not a Midnight Commander problem as such - it is clearly the fault
of the distributions in some way.  However I find it extremely annoying,
and I really don't want to start configuring a new server with a recent
distribution of Linux until I can solve the problem.  Older versions of
Red Hat (up to 7.3) did not have this issue.  Surprisingly I have not
found any solutions by Googling or by checking the MC archives.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks for any help.

Regards

Jim Holland
System Administrator
MANGO - Zimbabwe's non-profit e-mail service