/etc/profile doesn't get sourced at start of session

Question

Hello to everyone :D. I've been using Windows my entire life until January when someone recommended me Ubuntu. I tried (and loved it) for some months but got sick of the lack of control, the pre-installed packages and the incorporation of Unity in 11.04, so went all out for Arch.
It took me 2-whole-days to install everything correctly (because of issues related with the PC rather than Arch itself) and I've been configuring it bit by bit in the last two weeks (wasted my whole winter vacations on it, but it was worth it :P), ran through a lot of trouble which I've been (somehow) able to overcome almost completely by just using the Wikia (and Googling through old forum posts). I also learned a whole lot about Linux in that time and I'm very happy with my new system :D. So a thanks a lot to all the community for the great documentation you've developed, it really made a complete Linux-newbie (with a whole lot of patience :P) get a working system all by himself which is saying a lot.
------------------------------------------------------------------START READING HERE TO SKIP PERSONAL INTRO :P ---------------------------------------------------------------------
However right now I'm having a couple of minor issues which don't prevent me from enjoying the system but I would rather fix in order to have a clean system (and avoid further trouble in the future). I have LXDE installed with Slim as a login manager which I start through inittab in run level 5 to start X (relevant files attached at the end of the post). The system was working perfectly but I noticed that my session wasn't being registered by ConsoleKit (it didn't appear in the "who" command which was a problem for some scripts I was building) so I read the wikia and added the following lines at "slim.conf":
sessionstart_cmd    /usr/bin/sessreg -a -l $DISPLAY %user
sessionstop_cmd     /usr/bin/sessreg -d -l $DISPLAY %user
Which happily made the session appear at the "who" command as I needed. However some days after that, for no apparent reason (actually me touching config files probably), my PATH environment variable was wrong after booting (just had the /bin and /usr/bin on it, not /sbin or /usr/sbin). This just happens when I boot directly to X, when booting from a terminal the variable value was correct.
After some research (and adding debugging commands in the initialization scripts) I concluded that my "/etc/profile" script wasn't getting ran when I boot directly to X. In order to bypass this problem temporally I made a (absolutely horrible and temporal) patch by adding the line "source /etc/profile" at ".xinitrc" which sourced the file and gave me the right value for the PATH variable. However by doing it seems I ruined the former problem and my session doesn't appear at the "who" command again :S (by removing it again, the session appears again but the PATH variable is wrong). So I've been searching exactly when /etc/profile is sourced and, apparently, it's when the "login" command is executed (which I guess is done by either the LXDE session or Slim itself).
Since none of these packages got updates when the problem appeared I'm pretty sure it must have been one of my editions of the config files. So I leave the ones I think are relevant to the issue (and the ones that I tinkered it with the most).
If anyone has the time to point me in the right direction I would greatly appreciate it:
/etc/rc.conf: http://pastebin.com/qd5xYYsT
/etc/inittab: http://pastebin.com/M1h60Hym
/etc/slim.conf: http://pastebin.com/iaRqya07
/etc/profile: http://pastebin.com/JLtNCMtn
~/.xinitrc: http://pastebin.com/XGrNuhpv
My rc.local file is completely blank and rc.sysinit and rc.multi haven't been modified from their default values. If you need any more files, logs or any kind of experiment to gather more info just let me know and I'll post it as soon as I read it.
Thanks a lot in advance :-).
Last edited by facucosta (2011-07-27 08:29:50)

Answer 1

There is quite some confusion about the different startup files For real terminal work you can check the bash manual. Graphical login managers however do not always follow these rules even though Slim should read /etc/profile as /etc/slim.conf seems to invoke bash with --login... You could try to put the settings in /etc/environment (see the arch wiki). There might also be a slim specific bug
--edit--
On second look line 35 seems odd in your slim.conf. You could try to change it to:
login_cmd           exec /bin/sh --login ~/.xinitrc %session
Last edited by FarmerF (2011-07-27 11:10:15)