GConf is a configuration database system, functionally similar to the Windows registry but lots better. :-) It's being written for the GNOME desktop but does not require GNOME; configure should notice if GNOME is not installed and compile the basic GConf library anyway. GConf does require glib and ORBit. It has optional ldap and xml backends that require openldap and libxml respectively. For information, see: http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ There's a mailing list gconf-list@gnome.org, see http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gconf-list. The GConf maintainer is Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com>. Bugs and patches should be filed in Bugzilla, http://bugzilla.gnome.org, against the GConf product. Send questions and comments to Havoc or to gconf-list@gnome.org.