Re: LD_LIBRARY_PATH

[Ewan Mellor <sawfish ewanmellor org uk>]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2005 at 12:03:23PM -0400, Josh Babcock wrote:

> At first I thought that I was experiencing a known problem with ssh-agent, 
> but when I removed it from my .xsession file the problem didn't go away. 
> Before running xinit, my LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set exactly as it was in my 
> profile, but when I open a shell from within sawfish LD_LIBRARY_PATH is 
> unset, completely absent. This is causing me a lot of problems. I can get 
> around it by setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH in my .bashrc file, but that is an 
> ugly hack and will undoubtedly cause confusion down the line. I really want 
> to be able to set this variable in my .profile and not have to worry about 
> it.

It will depend upon how your distro sets up xinit, but I think the consensus
these days is that your X session is a proper login session, and that the
environment for that is controlled by your ~/.xsession, /etc/X11/Xsession,
etc.  In other words, it's down to those files to set things like
LD_LIBRARY_PATH, not .profile, as in an X environment you can't guarantee that
someone is inside a shell.

It sounds like your xinit is throwing away the current environment and
starting clean, so you want to explicitly source ~/.bash_profile inside your
~/.xsession.  Depending upon your distro, there might be somewhere sensible
and system-wide to put these settings too.

HTH,

Ewan.