bonobo-activation-server - GNOME component tracker
This application tracks information about installed components and brokers components, in conjunction with its client library; libbonobo-activation.
It reads the component descriptions from ${prefix}/lib/bonobo/servers/*.server. These files provide an XML description of a components capabilities which can be queried and manipulated by clients from the client library.
Bonobo-activation-server also ensures that the minimum neccessary number of servers for your display setup are running.
Bonobo-activation-server executes all components with the environment inherited from the first process to start the server. In addition to using your prefix, it will examine the BONOBO_ACTIVATION_PATH and the GNOME2_PATH environment variables to find .server files.
In addition it examines an XML configuration file in ${prefix}/etc/bonobo-activation/bonobo-activation-config.xml
For more information see http://www.gnome.org.