I have a number of versions of gnome installed on a number of different hosts. All users have network mounted home directories. In some cases gnome works poorly when reading configuration from the .gnome2 directory. I would like to read config files from version specific directories. Is there any way to specify this when starting gnome? Environment variables perhaps? I know how to move the .gconf directories but this is not sufficient. I need to read the .gnome2 from a different path.
How do I read alternate gnome configuration files
linux;gnome;configuration
Looking at the developer documentation it doesn't look as if it was possible to use other directories than the default. You could have version-dependent directories and link them to ~/.gnome2 at login, however this breaks as soon as a user is logged in at two different hosts at a time.