http://cwrapper.sourceforge.net is a great application for colourizing the output from programs like make, gcc, ps, df, etc. I find it particularly usefull for make and gcc since it highlights warnings and errors.
Its extremely easy to install. I had to modify it a bit to compile under QNX but it works out of the tarball for linux. Basically:
tar jxvf cw.tar.gz; cd cw;
./configure && make install;
echo "export PATH=/usr/local/lib/cw:$PATH" >> .bashrc
To configure other programs or tweak it, edit the wrapper config files in /usr/local/lib/cw
