metacityconfig
Gnome Metacity Config
Configuring Button Locations of Gnome Windows
General metacity window buttons would look something like this.
What if you want to change the button locations ie.. the location of the maximize, minimize and the close buttons. For example if you want to put close button at the left most portion of the window. This can be done using the following command:
gconftool-2 -s --type string /apps/metacity/general/button_layout 'close:minimize,maximize'
This essentially means put close to left most (since its' before ':') and others to the right most part of the window top.
Note: The above works for me in FC4 gnome 2.10.1, it should work most of the time