Global environment variables under Gnome?

[Mart van de Wege <wege34 zonnet nl>]

People,

A minor question just popped up recently: How do I set
environment variables in Gnome? On my old setup (RH 6.2) it was
just a question of adding the right export statements to /etc/profile,
these somehow seemed to be inherited by my gnome session,
however I recently switched to Debian 2.2 and it seems to handle
this differently. I must specifically add a 'source /etc/profile' line to
my user profile files, and it will only honor this from a terminal.
This is a bit of a pain when installing things like Mozilla or Sun's
JDK from tarballs, as these programs want several variables set
before running.
I already rewrote the Mozilla start script, however I don't want to
this for every non-Debian package I install. Anybody got any
clues?

Mart van de Wege