I'm using gnome terminal, and vim with solarized color theme. When I open vim in the terminal, it's illegible.
But when I open a file in gvim, the color scheme works perfectly.
Gnome terminal's color scheme is also solarized. One thing to note is that, if I set an illegal value for background, I get the expected background color (but also an error).
Best Answer
To complete Akira's advice, vim in term mode uses the terminal color palette. From the vim solarized colorscheme repo :
For gnome-term, there are instructions to set up the color palette.