Set Permanent Environmental Variables 12.04LTS

[mysteriouskiwi]

Hi,

Having a little trouble finding good documentation on adding in environmental variables permanently in Ubuntu 12.04LTS.

I've read the official documentation, search on these forums on others and viewed all relevant posts from other people on editing the: ~/.bashrs , ~/.profile , /etc/environment.

I've also tried adding a ~/.pum_environment with the supposed correct formating, which caused a crash of my user, fixing it by going into the text login (CTRL+ATL+F1) and loading the default PATH variables again (. /etc/environment) and deleting the file.

I'm trying to add these, as currently I am doing it manually in the Terminal at the beginning of each session.

export NETKIT_HOME=~/netkit
export PATH=$PATH:$NETKIT_HOME/bin
export MANPATH=:$NETKIT_HOME/man

I'm currently using netkit and really would like to add these to my PATH to remove me doing to manually.

I'm assuming I need to add it to ~/.profile , which i have tried logged-in, out, to reload it and nothing happened (creating a backup first of course, in case it failed).

I would like really simple instructions to learn it first. Please if you respond, could include why things are placed there so I actually learn something instead of just doing it? Hehe

The original documentation is here: http://wiki.netkit.org/netkit-labs/netkit_introduction/netkit-introduction.pdf (page 16, "Setting up Netkit").

Thanks