I’ve been using an external monitor with my laptop at work for quite a while. Ubuntu 9.04 did this like I expected:
xrandr --output VGA --mode 1280x1024 --above LVDS
will use my external monitor as an extension and put it virtually on top of my laptop screen, with the panel on top of the virtual desktop. After upgrading to 9.10, this doesn’t work anymore. The first thing is to change VGA and LVDS to VGA1 and LVDS1, but after that, the location of my top panel changed:
The old setting gives me easy access to my top panel, now if I want to use that panel I need to move my pointer to a very thin band between two physical monitors, which is extremely difficult to do. How stupid is that?