How does gnome determine where the home is?

[Felix Blanke <f_blan01 uni-muenster de>]

Hello everyone,

I am trying to implement some kind of a local profile. Normally, when 
someone logs in, his home is mounted (from a cluster) and used. Thats 
the default behaviour in our enviroment.
Now we want to use a second approach: When someone logs in, his profile 
(which should only consist of settings) will be rsynced to the local 
drive and used.
Therefore I'm doing the sync and set the $HOME variable to the local 
home and then run something like gnome-session, startkde, startfluxbox etc.

This works great with e.g. KDE, but gnome still uses the network home 
and I don't know why. What does gnome use to determine what directory to 
use as the home directory?
When using gnome with the local profile most programs (firefox, 
thunderbird, opera,...) does use $HOME and use the right home directory, 
but gnome itself seems to ignore $HOME :(


Anyone out there does know what extra switch I have to use to solve that 
problem?

--
Felix Blanke
Support | Uni Münster | support math uni-muenster de
Telefon: 83 33754 E-Mail: f_blan01 uni-muenster de