Panning the screen to get an usable GNOME desktop in netbooks

[Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com>]

Hello,

In my intent to make my netbook more usable (because I can barely use 
some applications such the recently available Pan), I'm trying to get a 
virtual screen (panning) that allows me to configure some applications 
that fail to display the usual bottom buttons (Cancel, Apply, Accept...).

So to get the extra space, I run:

xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1024x600 --fb 1024x768 --panning 1024x768

Which returns nothing (meaning a success command) and I can see the 
display has been somehow "cutted" at the bottom but I can't move the 
mouse cursor beyond the bottom edge so the controlable area is still 
1024x600.

I tried to make the window of a smaller height but I only could adjust 
its width which was of no help in this case.

I finally had to remotely connect from another system with bigger screen 
to configure the Pan settings from there but that's of course a bypass 
not a solution at all, n[eo]books are aimed to be standalone devices :-)

I know this is a well-known problem for these kind of small devices but I 
would like to find a solution or at least a suitable bypass that does not 
require a secondary system.

The computer runs Wheezy with GNOME and gnome-shell and the nebook screen 
is 10.1" with a 1024x600 resolution. It uses an Intel chipset (N10) as 
VGA.

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón