Curses in colour?

[Chris Reay]

I am developing a text user interface and I want to be able to colour
widgets, backgrounds and so on. My Linux Red Hat 6.2 system definitely
displays colours; I can see that from my Vim syntax highlighting, for
example. However my curses application won't, as this function, which
returns 0 shows:

import curses

def testColor():
    curses.initscr()
    curses.start_color()
    retVal = curses.can_change_color()
    curses.endwin()
    return retVal

My interpreter is Python V2.1 built bog-standard from the Python2.1
tarball.

Thanks for any help.

Chris