Initialization

The GConf client library must be initialized before use. Initialization establishes a connection to the ORB (because CORBA is currently used to implement GConf, though clients never have to see this) and sets up some global data structures. The arguments to gconf_init() are an argc/argv pair to check for CORBA-related command line options, and a location to place any error that occurs. gconf_init() returns TRUE on success.

You can check whether GConf is initialized with gconf_initialized().