I don't believe that you are missing anything, it is just that certain
things haven't been explained correctly.

When you start a Terminal or Console it needs certain values set to be
able to behave the way you require and those values are set using
{.profile, .bash_profile, .cshrc, .sh, .bashrc, /etc/profile, etc.}.

When you start X it normally begins in it's own sh environment and is
devoid of any environment variables unless they are specified in the
global or local {.xsession, .xinitrc, .Xresources,
/etc/X11/(xdm/gdm)/.xinit, etc.}

So in your previous statement where you see that your Window Manager
has no environment variables set, but your terminal/console windows
do, it is operating as designed.

A word of caution, when setting environment variables globally for X,
you also allow anyone who may exploit your box access to those same
environment variables - possibly making it even easier for intruders
to abuse your computer.

On Sun, 19 Dec 2004 08:26:04 -0700, Mark Phillips
<mark@phillipsmarketing.biz> wrote:
>  Jeremy,
>  
>  Thanks again for your response. I am still missing something.
>  
>  My /home/mark/.xsession file (how strange that you know I use kde....)
>  
>  mark@latitude610:~$ cat .xsession
>  . /etc/profile
>  exec startkde
>  mark@latitude610:~$
>  
>  But when I try this, I still don't have my environment variables set:
>  
>  mark@latitude610:~$ echo $JAVA_HOME
>  
>  mark@latitude610:~$
>  
>  However, this works in a terminal window:
>  
>  mark@latitude610:~$ . /etc/profile
>  mark@latitude610:~$ echo $JAVA_HOME
>  /usr/local/lib/jdk
>  mark@latitude610:~$
>  
>  What am I missing, so that the environment variables are loaded when I
> login? Is there a global place (like /etc/profile) where I can put my
> environment variables and have them available when I login?  I tried
> rummaging around the gdm documentation and on the net, but I can't seem to
> find out how to do this. That surprises me, since I would think this would
> be a common problem and would have been solved already. 
>  
>  I am also surprised that there isn't a way to do source /etc/profile in
> gdm.conf. I looked at the gdm manual
> (http://www.jirka.org/gdm-documentation/x241.html) and found this:
>  ----snip----
>  BaseXsession 
>  BaseXsession=<etc>/gdm/Xsession 
> 
>  This is the base X session file. When a user logs in, this script will be
> run with the selected session as the first argument. The selected session
> will be the Exec= from the .desktop file of the session. 
> 
>  If you wish to use the same script for several different display managers,
> and wish to have some of the script run only for GDM, then you can check the
> presence of the GDMSESSION environmental variable. This will always be set
> to the basename of .desktop (without the extension) file that is being used
> for this session, and will only be set for GDM sessions. Previously some
> scripts were checking for GDM_LANG, but that is only set when the user picks
> a non-system default language. 
> 
>  This script should take care of doing the "login" for the user and so it
> should source the /etc/profile and friends. The standard script shipped with
> GDM sources the files in this order: /etc/profile then ~/.profile then
> /etc/xprofile and finally ~/.xprofile. Note that different distributions may
> change this however. Sometimes users personal setup will be in
> ~/.bash_profile, however broken that is. ----snip----
>  
>  My gdm.conf has the entry BaseXsession= /etc/gdm/Xsession, and
> /etc/gdm/Xsession does exist. It seems that Debian (my distro) must change
> this process somehow since it does not source /etc/profile (see the last
> paragraph).
>  
>  Boy, am I confused! 
>  
>  Thanks!
> 
>  
>  Mark
>  
>  Jeremy C. Reed wrote: 
>  On Sat, 18 Dec 2004, Mark Phillips wrote: 
>  Thanks for your response....I tried the following and the environment
> variables I set up in /etc/profile are still not being read: 1. Created a
> file .xsession 2. Added these lines: . /etc/profile exec gdm Don't restart
> the display manager. The display manager will run ~/.xsession. exec startkde
> # or exec blackbox # for example Jeremy C. Reed BSD News, BSD tutorials, BSD
> links http://www.bsdnewsletter.com/
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