Configure MC and aptitude color schemes

Maybe a quick fix: mc -b forces no-color mode ;)

You can write your own skins for mc, which include a color scheme. They live in ~/.mc/skins and are selected by mc -S skinname. This article talks a bit about it and has an example available for download at the end.

But maybe the deeper trouble is that your term background is "not the expected color", so another way would be to change how your term displays the 16 "standard colors". (For example, this would make all formerly-green items purple, if that's better for you from a contrast standpoint.) How this is done depends on your terminal emulator, for example XFCE's Terminal has it in its preferences dialog, for xterm you probably need to edit a configuration file etc.

From the changelog:

Version 4.8.0-pre1

WARNING: Configuration files was moved from your $HOME/.mc directory into XDG_CONFIG_* directories to respect FDO standard (http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-0.7.html)

mcedit .config/mc/ini
search for skin with F7
skin=modarin256 is really nice for example :) Look into /usr/share/mc/skins/ to see the different themes.