I never realized how much time I spend at this site until I made it my home page, so first I'd like to say thanx to all the members and helpful people who post their intelligence for the benefit of others.

But moving right along...
I wanted to run linuxconf on RH9, so I downloaded it and installed it and now I get an error on startup and every time I try to run linuxconf.

linuxconf: error while loading shared libraries: libgd.so.1.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

What is this and where do I get these "shared libraries"?

Did you install from an RPM package, or did you compile linuxconf from source? If the latter, I think you would be better off with the former.

If the former, it looks like you are missing some dependency, which the package manager should have detected. libgd.so is a graphics library which linuxconf seems to think it needs. There is also an RPM package gd-1.8.1, which will provide this library, so you could try installing that.

If you are curious, the missing file should be in directory /usr/lib, so you can also check for it directly.

Disclaimer: Don't know anything about Redhat, slightly less about linuxconf.