Deploying customized gnome installations

[Edvard Fagerholm <efagerho cc hut fi>]

Hello!

Is there an easy way to configure a template installation of gnome and then
export the settings to the system default? Basically I'd like to configure the
panels, applets, menus etc. and then create a simple package of the generated
files, so that I can distribute it to all workstations.

Currently I've made everything via gconftool or by simply editing the
xml-files, but this seems unnecessary complicated. I assume that the
configuration produced by the graphical tools are host independent, so I can
simply distribute the same files to all computers?

Currently I'm running gnome 2.6 and I'm not planning to update to 2.8 until
november, so if this can't be done any other way in 2.6, then that's fine. If
it can be done in 2.8, that's great, but it doesn't help me yet. :)

Regards,
Edvard