found the key at http://www.osxfaq.com/tips/unix-tricks/week105/wednesday.ws for why it wasn’t reading my .bashrc file…

and ~/.bash_profile [or ~/.profile] should source ~/.bashrc:

source ~/.bashrc

which made it work!

They also had tricks to make X windows start login shells instead of non-login… http://www.osxfaq.com/tips/unix-tricks/week105/tuesday.ws