I'm using Maverick "10.10" Meercat on a HP Pavilion tx2110. This machine has an NVidia Go6150 graphics card, and sports a 1280x800 display. I have an external monitor which can do 1280x1024 resolution. FWIW I'm using openbox as my window manager; as I understand it this shouldn't be a factor.

I'd like to clone the display to the monitor, so that the size of the desktop remains at 1280x800, and there is a horizontal blank area on the external monitor. I.E. I want to avoid having to pan the display of the desktop on either monitor. So the actual resolution of the monitor would be 1280x1024, but the resolution of the section of the monitor where stuff was actually being displayed would be 1280x800.

Using the nvidia-settings applet, I'm able to set up the cloned display so that the desktop size is 1280x1024 (the resolution of the external monitor), but can't find a way to instead have the desktop size stay at the resolution of the laptop's built-in display.

Is this achievable? Ideally I'd like the external monitor's blank area to be at the top of the screen, i.e. for it to align the display with the bottom of the screen.