So At home I like to use Debian, well to be honest I use it anywhere I can, but that is aside from the point here.I recently switched my laptop to Debian (came with Ubuntu, finally had enough of Unity) with Cinnamon as the desktop environment.  I happily went along just playing around like normal, enjoying the nice DE, and clean looks.

Then one day, I go to install my Java IDE and get rolling on some code.  I setup Java and Android SDKs, add the JAVA_HOME and ANDROID_HOME variables to my .profile, and fire up the IDE; only to be greeted with an error stating my JAVA_HOME isn’t setup.  OK, maybe it is just being weird and I need to define an IDE, it jumps straight to the correct directory when I browse for one, so it must be working.  Run the Gradle jobs and let’s co… Oh ANDROID_HOME isn’t set… wtf there must be something up.

This led me down a path for a couple hours trying to figure out where the DE is reading it’s info from.  Ubuntu, Debian (Wheezy, I’m now on Jessie), and Fedora all use .profile for the DE, this should be working!  After much googling I finally found that the magic combination of Jessie + lightdm + cinnamon they either forgot or removed the script for reading the /etc/profile and ~/.profile.  Thanks to this guy on Superuser, I was pointed in the right direction.

Hopefully this post might help some of you out there, and hopefully this gets fixed soonish, as my next step is filing a bug report with the appropriate folks!