Is it possible to make gnome-panel span across the top of both screens (positioned side-by-side)?
Preferably, it should involve a solution where the additional screen can be painlessly added or removed at a whim - this is a laptop set up; Xorg restarts are a no-go, and DPI/position/resolution of the screens are different (so it does not look like one big screen, if you know what I mean).
If this helps: I am using NVidia's proprietary, Ubuntu 10.04.
I have done this but only by accident. It's not something I would recommend.
You can, however just add another panel (right click an existing panel and click New Panel) and drag it onto the new screen (might need to hold alt to drag it).
I have two panels that sit side-by-side over two monitors and they look like a single strip.
Actually I remember how I did this before. I turned Xinerama on (I think, might be off). X and the window manager will stop doing monitor detection and will treat the whole screen as one big thing. The side effect of this is all window-maximise actions will span both screens.
Just having two panels is much cleaner, IMO. But if you want to do this, add this to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf. I assume you're using the nvidia driver so you should have one of these.
Section "ServerFlags"
Option "Xinerama" "on"
EndSection
