I've done some googling already, and I'm sorry if this is obvious. I'm running the minimal gentoo livecd, and I'm going through the handbook setting everything up. So far what I've read of the handbook makes no mention of this color coding.

I'm wondering what the colors mean that are highlighting certain text. For example, 'livecd' is red, and '~ #' is blue. I'm setting up network devices manually, and when I get the list of kernel drivers, some are highlighted blue, while others are white.

Is this color coding constant across linux environments, or unique to gentoo? Again, sorry if this is obvious, but I'm a long time windows user, so even managing things through a command prompt is new to me.

edit: Fixed. I was using ls to list kernel driver directories, and the white text options were drivers, while the blue text ones were just other folders.

The colouring scheme is not a standard or something. It can vary not only between distros, but also depending on the shell you are using, or the terminal emulator of your choice. It can depend on many things, and sometimes you won't find colorst at all. It's just a way to quickly distinguish files of a given kind from the rest.

The colors of the prompt can also be set to your likings, they have no real meaning unless you decide so yourself. Don't give it too much thought.

If you are interested in learning a bit more about this, you can google around for info about how to set your prompt in bash (PS1 variable), ansi colors and the dir_colors file(s).