Setting Aliases and Paths before shell, and sudo shortcuts?

[rwgast]

Ok, Im a bit rusty havent used linux in a while but let me explain what I want to do. I know that the standard way is to make changes to your /.bashrc or /.bash_profile, But I need to add some development tools to my path and I need them to always be there.

Basically .bashrc is ran when a shell starts up, but what about when you havent started a bash shell yet and your just sitting in KDE? I want KDE to have access to these paths too for shortcuts and stuff. Is /etc/init.d what im looking for?

Also is there a way to create sudo shortcuts on the desktop?

[Gareth Jones]

Have you tried ~/.bash_profile? I'm still away from any Linux machines so I can't check right now, but certainly in the past it was normal for the graphical login scripts to source your profile.