Kile, biber and path issues on Precise

I've grown to like biber as a bibTeX backend, as it's highly configurable. However, it was a bit of a stretch to get it to work on my work computer, which is on Kubuntu Precise LTS.
First of all, Precise ships with a prehistoric TeXLive 2009, so I needed the 2012 backport:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:texlive-backports/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Still no biber though, as the 0.9.9 version in the repository is broken (and has been for ages). There are binaries on sourceforge: biber 0.9.9, x86 and x64, which I untarred in ~/bin/.

Now for the Kile configuration. I followed this blog (it's in German, but the pictures are self explaining), but got a persistent "[Biber] failed to start" message. The reason was that Kile has no idea about the user's path settings - so anything like biber or even ~/bin/biber will fail.
/home/<myusername>/bin/biber worked nicely.

Example code:

\usepackage[style=numeric-comp,backend=biber,maxnames=3,sorting=none,abbreviate=true,firstinits=true,isbn=false,url=false,doi=false]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{bibfile1.bib}
\addbibresource{bibfile2.bib}
[…]
\printbibliography

The biber documentation can be found here.