I am running slackware 9.0 and I am having a problem. I have used KDE for the last few months and now I want to use GNOME. I was sucessfully able to change window managers but I am having a problem with my profile. While using KDE I modified my /etc/profile file to include new alias commands, modified the PATH variable and modified the prompt to be a $ sign. Some parts of my profile are working in GNOME but others are not. For example my prompt is not a $ sign, and my aliases are not working. THe PATH variable seems to be working however. What gives?

Another thing. I just tried this. If I run the command source /etc/profile in the terminal I have open my profile gets executed and works like it should. When I close this terminal and open a new one I am back to the old style.

I'm having a very similar problem with Gentoo. I'm using gdm instead of xdm and can run a number of window managers; kde, gnome, windowmaker, fluxbox. No matter which window manager I use, when I log in using a user account, I can't bring up an xterm (or any other term for that matter) But, everything is fine when I log in as root. When in a root xterm, I can su, or su -m, to my user account. Echoing PATH when logged in as a user shows that my PATH is not set according to the values in /etc/profile. If I source /etc/profile, everything is okay.

My next plan is to try creating a .profile file in my user directory and having it source /etc/profile. I'll let you know if it works.