How can I change the TTY colors?

Finally found it! As it turns out, I was searching for the wrong term. Apparently the TTYs run on a framebuffer, which is what the colors get changed in.

From this blog post but customized to use the railscasts theme colors, add the following to ~/.bashrc:

if [ "$TERM" = "linux" ]; then
    echo -en "\e]P0232323" #black
    echo -en "\e]P82B2B2B" #darkgrey
    echo -en "\e]P1D75F5F" #darkred
    echo -en "\e]P9E33636" #red
    echo -en "\e]P287AF5F" #darkgreen
    echo -en "\e]PA98E34D" #green
    echo -en "\e]P3D7AF87" #brown
    echo -en "\e]PBFFD75F" #yellow
    echo -en "\e]P48787AF" #darkblue
    echo -en "\e]PC7373C9" #blue
    echo -en "\e]P5BD53A5" #darkmagenta
    echo -en "\e]PDD633B2" #magenta
    echo -en "\e]P65FAFAF" #darkcyan
    echo -en "\e]PE44C9C9" #cyan
    echo -en "\e]P7E5E5E5" #lightgrey
    echo -en "\e]PFFFFFFF" #white
    clear #for background artifacting
fi

Ubuntu has a kbd package and in that, among many useful things, there's /sbin/setvtrgb.

It's truly awesome!

Sadly,in its manual no mention about /etc/vtrgb nor /etc/init/setvtrgb.conf file, other than that it's pretty straight forward.

Here's mine:

0,170,0,170,51,119,0,170,85,255,85,252,102,187,85,255
0,0,170,85,85,34,170,170,85,85,255,233,136,68,255,255
0,0,0,0,153,136,170,170,85,85,85,79,187,170,255,255