So I'm trying to run Eclipse on my freshly-installed Debian, but it complains about the Java binaries not being in the path. No problem, I change it. So I can open Eclipse from the command line, but for some reason, I can't seem to make the path change permanent. I found that there is a line for setting the user path in /etc/gdm/gdm.conf, but even when I do this, it just reverts back to the default for some reason! Anyone know how I can make my path change permanent whilst still using GDM?

Hmm. .Xsession? /etc/profile? .profile? gdm didn't work...

I don't know off the top of my head where the PATH gets set, I've never had to change it...

The system-wide bash startup script is /etc/profile. The user startup script is in ~/.bash_profile for bash. Setting the path (via export) in one of those files should make it permanent.
EDIT:
To append something to PATH you would do something like this:

export PATH=$PATH:/additional/path1:/additional/path2:etc...

Just as a follow-up... I had only had this problem running KDE. The /etc/profile was edited appropriately, but the problem is that that's not read when you login thru GDM (as far as I could tell). However, when I use XFCE, I don't have this problem. So I'm really not sure what was going on there.

Hmm, weird. I use GDM and IceWM and never had this happen to me. I set my path variable in ~/.bashrc though.

As a work around, you might want to try setting a symbolic link from the actual jre directory (where ever you have java installed) to the Eclipse directory.

KDE control center knob?