et dans la console

as tu essayé d'ouvrir une session sur une console texte?

peut etre que c'est ton terminal X ou ton window manager qui ne lance pas le shell correctement.

j'avais eu le meme probleme avec cde sous solaris, bash n'etait pas lance en "interactive login shell"

voir man bash:

When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable. The --noprofile option may be used when the shell is started to inhibit this behavior.