What ... no Wireframe mode?!

I still can't believe the makers of Metacity didn't and don't see fit to add wireframe features to their window manager. Just makes everyone want to run back to Sawfish. Here's a patched version specifically for Mandrake 9.1 but which should work with any distribution. You'll find the details in this README file (included as README_WIREFRAME in the source archive). Hope this is useful!

Download

metacity-2.4.34-3mdk.wireframe.i586.rpm (1.4 MB)
metacity-2.4.34-3mdk.wireframe.tgz (2.9 MB)

FYI, you will need to install the following development RPMs in order to compile Metacity:

libgtk+2.0_0-devel-2.2.1-2mdk.i586
libgtk+-x11-2.0_0-2.2.1-2mdk
libgdk_pixelbuf2.0_0-devel-2.2.1-2mdk
libpango1.0_0-devel-1.2.1-1mdk
libatk1.0_0-devel-1.2.2-1mdk
libgtk+-x11-2.0_0-devel-2.2.1-2mdk

Please note that I don't guarantee that the patch doesn't introduce any bugs. What I do guarantee is that I have not encountered many problems, given my own usage patterns. One bug I know of can be reproduced by using the "raise window" keyboard shortcut repeatedly; the result is very similar to the problem which I thought I resolved with Alt-Tab window switching.