Re: Initialization of environment variables for guix on foreign distro

[David Lecompte]

Hello Thiago,

Le jeudi 23 décembre 2021 à 21:33 -0300, Thiago Jung Bauermann a
écrit :
> I had a similar issue recently on my Ubuntu laptop, when I switched
> the
> display manager from SDDM to GDM. From what I gather, the latter
> launches the desktop session without using a shell so at no point the
> shell initialization files are evaluated and thus the environment
> isn’t set
> up as usual.
> 
> I use KDE Plasma, and it has a mechanism to evaluate shell scripts to
> set the environment, so in my case to fix the problem what I had to
> do
> was:
> 
> $ ln -s /etc/profile ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/profile.sh
> 

Thanks for sharing this.

> I searched a bit, but unfortunately I couldn’t find an equivalent
> solution for MATE.
> 

I have a bit of difficulty finding documentation for Mate
unfortunately.

> I suppose one alternative would be to switch from GDM to SDDM. :-)

If using GDM implies that the setup of Guix will not work, I suppose
Guix should consider some improvement to make it work with GDM. I am
not sure GDM is really the problem.

On both computers, I am using lightdm, in my case, lightdm is surely
not the problem (it could be a different configuration of lightdm, I
could dig into lightdm documentation but it seems rather small).

> bash automatically reads /etc/profile when invoked as a login shell.
> There are more details here:
> 
>  
> https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-Startup-Files.html
> 

Yes and I can confirm it works.

That said, a mechanism to always invoke bash as login shell could have
side effects that I may find only much later. Or, after an upgrade,
that mechanism may stop working, or create other problems, and I could
have forgotten what I did manually.

Perhaps the problem even comes because of something I did manually and
can't remember.

If anyone is using Guix with Debian 11 and Mate, I am interested to
know whether that problem exists or not.

David.

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