In Ubuntu, environment variables should be defined (globally) in “/etc/environment”

Use your favorite text editor (in sudo) to modify the file

for example:

(command) sudo nano /etc/envrionment

Example File Contents:

PATH=”/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/genome/bin”
CONSED_HOME=”/usr/local/genome/bin”

To call the variable in terminal, prefix it with a “$”, in this case, I would do something like cd $CONSED_HOME, this will change directory to “/usr/local/genome/bin

To update the variables without rebooting, use the following command

source /etc/environment

From: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2655641/set-environment-variable-in-ubuntu