Setting up a color scheme for Emacs

I am an Emacs newbie. I found a nice color theme for Emacs and wanted to set it as default. Following the instructions from the color-scheme homepage did not work. After some searching I found out a way to make it work.

I installed emacs-goodies-el using apt-get and put the following in my $HOME/.emacs.el file:
(require 'color-theme) (load-file "/path/to/color-theme-chocolate-rain.el") (color-theme-chocolate-rain)
I am reproducing this here in the hope that someone else will find it useful. I am running Emacs 22.2.1 (i486-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.16.1) of 2010-03-26 on palmer, modified by Ubuntu on Ubuntu Jaunty.