Comment 26 for bug 144641

Correct. These settings are now stored in your ~/.gnome2/monitors.xml rather than xorg.conf, so will be per-user settings rather than system-wide as with displayconfig-gtk. They are applied during login by gnome-settings-daemon. (A useful debugging tip to note, is that if your system gets messed up, deleting ~/.gnome2/monitors.xml will restore it to defaults.)

Regarding profiles, the long term design approach is that you'd be able to specify multiple configurations in monitors.xml, and the system would evaluate them based on what displays are connected, and automatically select between them. This includes hotplug detection of monitor plugin, so switching between predefined setups would be as simple as plugging/unplugging the monitors. Hotkey support is also in progress of implementation. So yeah, not only will it have profiles, but it should be even easier to make use of them. I expect most of these to hit for Intrepid (it's pretty late for any new features in hardy unfortunately).

If anyone is interested in coding on these or any other features, we'd be very interested in taking patches. The code's fairly straightforward C, mostly in gnome-desktop, with some UI stuff done in gnome-control-center, and the backend daemon interface in gnome-settings-daemon. I'd be happy to provide mentoring for anyone wishing to put more good ideas into the tool.