The goal of gecco (GNOME Extensible Configuration COnsole) is to provide a central location for accessing system administration functions within the GNOME environment.

There are currently many administration tools already in existance, with more to come. Most of these, however, are for small and relatively minor tasks and do not need to be stand-alone applications. The fact that these tasks are, in reality, being addressed by separate applications makes for a more difficult time in managing administration tools than needs to be.

gecco addresses this issue by providing a common location for the administration 'loose-ends' through the use of plugins. Plugins are, in effect, regular GNOME applications that employ a pair of functions to interface with gecco. This simple approach means that writing new plugins is almost identical to normal GNOME development, with the addition of two functions. Moreover, because of the simplicity of design, existing applications are quite easily modified to implement the gecco API (see PLUGIN-HOWTO for details on writing plugins).

The plugins (which typically exist in /usr/share/gecco/plugins), are read on startup and presented as icons within gecco. They are invoked by the standard means of double-clicking or the use of menu items.

gecco's plugins do not otherwise have any interaction either among themselves or with gecco itself.

gecco was designed on a GNU/Linux system. It is not known (yet) if it will compile cleanly on other Unix and Unix-like systems. Ideally, gecco will function on all platforms that GNOME can be found on, though this has not been tested. Anyone wishing to do a little investigation in this area is welcome to do so. Any feedback is appreciated.