As you know, the close, maximize and minimize buttons belong on the right hand side of the window title bar. For some reason in recent history, ubuntu decided to move them to the left hand side to be more inline with Mac OSX windows. Considering ubuntu is supposed to be an operating system aimed at luring people away from windows, this is a bad choice.
There is however a very simple way of moving these buttons back to the right hand side where they belong.
You first need to open up a terminal window “Applications > Accessories > Terminal” and type the following command:
sudo gconf-editor
This will load the gnome configuration editor. You will then need to navigate to “apps > metacity > general” in gconf-editor and find the “button_layout” setting.
Once you have found this, you need to change it from what it currently reads to:
close,minimize,maximize:
Once you have done this, you will see that the window buttons go back to where they belong and all is well with the world again.