After much consternation I feel the need to vent about shell environment initialization. With the default Debian installation, /etc/profile and ~/.bash_profile are not sourced in the X windows environment. Apparently this is because at no time is a login shell created which is necessary to trigger profile initialization.
Changing this behavior is relatively easy but of course knowing which solution is correct requires some experimentation. When I first asked about this there were basically 4 suggestions: 1) Start a login shell with the appropriate flags such as xterm -ls. It suffices to say this is not an ideal solution for all night coding sessions. 2) Source the profile from ~/.bashrc. Now none of the four scripts source any of the others near as I can tell so to get the system-wide profile *and* your local profile one would have to source both /etc/profile and ~/.bash_profile but I must admit I didn't fully explore this solution as it smelled like a band-aid right from the start. 3) Change the default Xresources or create a personal ~/.Xresources to make xterm and rxvt and whatever other terminal you wish to use to always be logon shells: *VT100*loginShell: true *Rxvt*loginShell: true This too seems like an odd solution as one might conceivably want a non-login shell otherwise it would have been setup this way by default. 4) Create a executable ~/.xsesssion with the following: #!/bin/bash --login exec x-session-manager Notice the --login is what does the trick. I suspect this is the most correct suggestion. Subsequent shells launched from the session will not be login shells but then I suspect that is the desired behavior because the profile environment is inherited rather than reevaluated. That seems much more natrual. There is one problem with this solution however. The ~/.xsession will not be executed unless the "Default System Session" is selected (at least from GDM that is). If you explicitly select GNOME or KDE for instance, ~/.xsession is never executed. For me, I had to have a ~/.xsession with the following: #!/bin/bash --login exec /usr/bin/wmaker But I propose a better solution: create the login shell duing X initialization so that the profile is sourced for all users. I think that's what most users would expect. Certainly each of us cannot be expected to go through everything I just did. Mike -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
