By default, gnome-terminal does not spawn a login shell. To use a login shell for all gnome-terminal windows for a particular user in gnome-terminal, you can use gnome-terminal preferences dialog:

“Edit” -> “Current Profile” -> “Title and Command” and select “Run command as a login shell”

Alternatively, using the command line tool “gconftool-2″ will achieve the same result:

# gconftool-2 --type boolean --set /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/login_shell true

To set this as a default option for all users, use gconftool-2 to set the default value of the key
Read more…