users should be able to set environment variables in cinnamon-session

[brianjmurrell]

There appears to be no way for an individual user to be able to set an environment variable in their cinnamon-session (i.e. such that all child processes inherit that variable).

Variables in /etc/environment are set into the users' cinnamon-session but users ought to be able to (a) do this without asking root to help and (b) set variables for only their own session and not every users' sessions.

[emmaly]

I was able to set per-user environment variables via ~/.xsessionrc. I'm running with lightdm+cinnamon on Debian Jessie. I don't know for certain, but I believe it's actually lightdm that is reading that file to set variables before cinnamon starts running.

[brianjmurrell]

@dustywilson: Thanks for the suggestion but the problem is that is log-in manager dependent. The point of this ticket is that one ought to be able to do this in Cinnamon without having to change log-in managers to do it.

[emmaly]

I understand and agree. I found this bug report while seeking out a solution, so I provided one when I figured it out in a way that worked on my system as configured. I do hope the issue is resolved correctly soon. Thanks!

[glebihan]

The place to define per-user environment variables is ~/.profile.
That works without the need for root permissions and is not dm-dependant.

[emmaly]

On my system (Debian Jessie, lightdm 1.10.3, cinnamon 2.2.16) ~/.profile is not used. It would be appropriate for it to be used, but the variables listed there do not effect anything spawned via the GUI. In my case I'm setting my GOPATH (for golang). It is effective for me via ~/.xsessionrc.

I agree, i need insert this code to allow the global menu implementation, nemo started so faster and i can not register the environment variables after the start of nemo... so, nemo as a gtk2 app is not called with the correct environment to be translated the appmenu, so, i fail to get a Dbus connection...

  g_setenv ("UBUNTU_MENUPROXY", "1", FALSE);
  const gchar *gtk_modules;

  gtk_modules = g_getenv ("GTK_MODULES");
  if (gtk_modules != NULL) {
    if(!g_str_match_string("unity-gtk-module", gtk_modules, FALSE)) {
      const gchar * new_gtk_modules = g_strconcat( "unity-gtk-module:", gtk_modules, NULL );
      g_setenv ("GTK_MODULES", new_gtk_modules, TRUE);
    }
  } else {
    g_setenv ("GTK_MODULES", "unity-gtk-module", FALSE);
  }

[Nowaker]

It doesn't look like adding an env var to ~/.xsessionrc has an effect on my Cinnamon when using Slim DM. In my case, I had to put the env vars in ~/.xinitrc.

[JPeisach]

Well, what environment variables are you thinking of?

[PowaBanga]

GTK_THEME could be a nice one...
All my GTK4 theme are not working because of that...