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, ORBit, libxml, and the popt option parsing library. XML will be optional in the future if someone writes another storage backend. There's an introductory article at http://developer.gnome.org/feature/current/index.html, written a while ago but mostly still valid. Also, there's a mailing list gconf-list@gnome.org, see http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gconf-list. The GConf maintainer is Havoc Pennington . 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.