Hi,

this should be an easy one i hope.

I am running debian sarge with GNOME as my GUI.

I have an aplication that requires me to define a certain environmental variable (the application is eclipse a java IDE and the variable is MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME). If this variable is not defined in the scope of the application when it is run it causes errors.

I've discovered that executing the following two lines in a shell

$ MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/mozilla
$ export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME

sets the enviromental variable. I can then open my application from the shell without errors.

The question is that instead of having to always do this and open my app from a shell i'd like to permanently define this enviromental variable (for all users) in a scope that will allow me to open the app from, say, a desktop icon or launch menu.

What vital piece of info am i missing, hope someone can help.

Add the environmental variable to your .bash_profile e.g.

reddazz's solution only works for your user. If you want it to work for all users, put reddazz's
command in /etc/profile instead of your .bash_profile.

Thanks for both your responses but unfortunately niether of them exported the variable inside a Gnome environment.

From what i've been able to find out the problem is that when you start a new xsession no bash login is performed and hence neither /etc/profile nor .bash_profile are executed.

The solution that i have found is to create a local profile script:

/etc/X11/Xsession.d/999local-profile

with the export command in it.

This does get executed and everything works fine however i'm pretty new to linux and don't know much about the xsession startup procedure or standard conventions. I've named the script 999.... because i read somewhere that it would execute last in the startup scripts, is this correct or is there a better standard way to export variables for an xsession?

It must be a Debian quirk because that procedure works on every other distro that I have tried.