how do you set the text color (actually turn it off) for different users, or globally?

what do you mean by text colour? each application can sontrol it's own output if it wishes to, e.g. running "ls --color"

ok - if you are in the CLI and execute a "ls -la". Depending on what file type the file is, it appears in different colors. How can/do you turn off the feature? Does that make sense?

well i know on my rh8 box, i just use the basic terminal located at
hat --> system tools --> terminal and if you go to the profile, there is a colors tab which there you can do what you wish...
but my question is, why would you want to turn that off....cause in my opinion that is a pretty neat feature...
when you do an ls.... whatever is blue is a folder what is white is just a regular file ( text, log, non-executable) whatevers green is some kind of file you can execute....i think thats alot better than having everything written in all black....

well then if you run "alias" that will list the aliased commands and ls will probably be aliased to "ls --color" or something, which is normally set in /etc/profile /etc/profile.d/aliases or similar.

thanks guys - I guess that what I really would like to do is tweak some of the color selections - I can't remember what the specific file type is, but it was a white font with yellow hightlight - that is what I am mainly trying to do - thanks again - (more suggestion are welcomed!!)

normally in /etc/profile.d/lscolors i think, have a poke around. this is of course ls specific

the colors are based on the LS_COLORS environment variable. the only way I've interacted with the colors is through the dircolors tool by specifying a file (e.g. eval dircolors -b ~/.dircolorsrc). The output from dircolors is the set of shell commands that will set LS_COLORS (and varies).