The shell through Gnome has colour but when you open another terminal (Alt-F[1-6]), you don't get colour by default.
Giving everyone colour

Edit

/etc/skel/.bash_profile

Uncomment the three lines that refer to .bashrc
This tells bash to look for .bashrc and use that before looking at the default profile

skel is where the default user account settings come from so when a new user is created, it will use these. But this doesn't make root colour. To make root colour edit /root/.bashrc. Colour in root's .bashrc is commented out so you have to delete the # marks in front of:

export LS_OPTIONS='--color=auto'
eval `dircolors`
alias ls='ls $LS_OPTIONS'
alias ll='ls $LS_OPTIONS -l'
alias l='ls $LS_OPTIONS -lA'