To know the list of available CORBA servers on your local machine, the Bonobo Activation daemon searches a number of directories for .server XML files which contain the description of the services offered by these servers. By default, Bonobo Activation will try to find them in ${prefix}/lib/bonobo/servers which may be a problem if users install other applications using Bonobo Activation in different prefixes. To work around this problem, Bonobo Activation will parse a number of other directories. It will parse the directories listed in the BONOBO_ACTIVATION_PATH environment variable. It will parse the prefixes listed in the GNOME2_PATH environment variable. If, for example, BONOBO_ACTIVATION_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/bonobo/servers:/opt/gnome2/bonobo-activation/lib/bonobo/servers, Bonobo Activation will parse /opt/gnome2/lib/bonobo/servers and /opt/gnome2/bonobo-activation/lib/bonobo/servers If GNOME2_PATH=/opt/gnome2:/opt/gnome2/bonobo-activation, Bonobo Activation will parse /opt/gnome2/lib/bonobo/servers and /opt/gnome2/bonobo-activation/lib/bonobo/servers. The above environment variables are kept to ease development with Bonobo Activation and for GNOME integration. Bonobo Activation has a much nicer configuration file which allows you to control which directories are parsed by Bonobo Activation. This XML configuration file is located in /etc/bonobo-activation/bonobo-activation-config.xml or ${prefix}/etc/bonobo-activation/bonobo-activation-config.xml. An empty bonobo-activation-config.xml and a sample bonobo-activation-config.xml.sample file should be installed on your system. It is recommended to use the bonobo-activation-sysconf command-line configuration tool to edit this file. However, here is an example of its format. <?xml version="1.0"?> <oafconfig> <searchpath> <item>/opt/gnome2/lib/bonobo/servers</item> <item>/usr/local/gnome2/lib/bonobo/servers</item> <item>/usr/local/lib/bonobo/servers</item> <item>/opt/gnome2/bonobo-activation/lib/bonobo/servers</item> </searchpath> <searchpath> <item>/opt/gnome2/bonobo-activation/lib/bonobo/servers</item> </searchpath> </oafconfig> There can be any number of item tags in a searchpath tag and any number of searchpath tags in the oafconfig tag.