Re: Global environment variables under Gnome?

[Toralf Lund <toralf kscanners com>]

Mart van de Wege wrote:

> --------------Replied message--------------
> Date: Thu, 09 Nov 2000 09:57:48 +0100
> From: Toralf Lund <toralf kscanners com>
> To: Mart van de Wege <wege34 zonnet nl>
> Subject: Re: Global environment variables under Gnome?
>
> Mart van de Wege wrote:
>
> > People,
> >
> > A minor question just popped up recently: How do I set
> > environment variables in Gnome? On my old setup (RH 6.2) it was
> > just a question of adding the right export statements to /etc/profile,
> > these somehow seemed to be inherited by my gnome session,
> > however I recently switched to Debian 2.2 and it seems to handle
> > this differently. I must specifically add a 'source /etc/profile' line to
> > my user profile files, and it will only honor this from a terminal.
>
> I think what's doing the trick with Red Hat Linux is the following line:
>
>      #!/bin/bash -login
>
> in /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession, which makes sure the entire session is run
> under a
> login shell, i.e. that /etc/profile is read. I don't know if this works on
> Debian, though...
>
> - Toralf
> -------------------------------------------
> Toralf,
>
> Will this really help? I use gdm to login, does this inherit from xdm
> somehow?

I think this depends on how it's configured. On our setup (Red Hat's default,
I believe), the default is to start Xsession, which will in turn issue
gnome-session. This may be confusing in the sense that the environment could
be different from the one you get when selecting "Gnome" explicitly, but it
means that a gdm login session will be identical to an xdm one unless you
explicitly tell it to be different, which I think is good.

> Also, according to another nice scandinavian sounding guy (Erik
> Bågfors) adding the right export

... or '#!/bin/bash -login'

> statements to
> /etc/gdm/Sessions/Gnome should do it, but after a recent recompile,

> Mozilla (31/7/00 nightly) still refuses to start from the panel (runs
> absolutely fine from a term though). This is getting me quite
> thoroughly stumped, and I don't want to edit the startup script every
> recompile. More help out there? Please?

Actually, all our gdm session scripts start with '#!/bin/bash -login', too.,
so perhaps you should try to change these as well. Using '-login' alll over
the place could mean that /etc/profile or similar is sourced more than one
time, but this shouldn't matter too much.

- Toralf