ssh-agent not getting set up

ssh-agent not getting set up

I set up a new user account for a friend on Kubuntu 12.04. When he uses
ssh he gets this error:
Could not open a connection to your authentication agent
We're running ssh in some bash scripts.
After looking around at the wide variety of things that can lead to that
error, I came across this solution:
$ eval `ssh-agent -s`
$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/some_id_rsa
Then he can run the ssh commands (and bash scripts) as expected.
I want to know how to set up his computer so he doesn't have to run those
two commands. I do not need to run them on my computer. So far I am not
seeing what is different between our machines.
I see this info in the man page, but it does not tell me how Ubuntu is
normally setting up the agent automatically or what is happening on my
friend's machine so that this is not working for him.
There are two main ways to get an agent set up: The first is that the
agent starts a new subcommand into which some environment variables are
exported, eg ssh-agent xterm &. The second is that the agent prints the
needed shell commands (either sh(1) or csh(1) syntax can be generated)
which can be evalled in the calling shell, eg eval �'ssh-agent
-s�' for
Bourne-type shells such as sh(1) or ksh(1) and eval �'ssh-agent
-c�' for
csh(1) and derivatives.