[Discuss] System wide Environment variables in Debian

[p.willis at telus.net]

Hello,

I have a driver that requires me to set a global environment
variable to point to a directory with firmware for the
PCI card.

The trouble is that, during boot, Debian does not appear to use
the environment variables from '/etc/environment'.

*Where* can I set environment system wide variables that can be used
as drivers are loading during hardware discovery at boot?

Where do I set global system environment variables at all in a
standard way on Debian? ('/etc/profile' ??)

At what point during the boot process, outside of the shell,
can the system make use of environment variables? (if at all)


Thanks,

Peter