Somehow, ArandR thinks that my external monitor (a ViewSonic VA2232) connected to my Asus VivoBook laptop is 1.33 aspect ratio as opposed to being wide-screen. Therefore, I can't get my monitor's resolution to match that of my laptop's screen, or even come close. My laptop's resolution is set @ 1366x768, and the best I can do on my monitor is 1024x768. This causes big problems with WM's like OpenBox, Fluxbox, etc. but not with desktops though. Any hints out there?

Hey Jeff

I don't know anything about ArandR, except it's a qui front end for xrandr, however if you go to the command line and enter "#xrandr" it will list the supported resolutions.
You should see two lists, one for screen 0.0 and a second for 0.1. If a reasonable resolution isn't available using the CLI you should probably look in your Xorg.log for warnings and errors (these are normally notated by (EE) for error or (WW) for warning, so something like grep 'EE\|WW' /var/log/Xorg.log should get you what you want. For that monitor to have such a low supported resolution, you almost have to have had a driver or module fail (my guess anyway).
If you want, post the output and we'll go over it for some answers.

I can get the external monitor to a higher setting (1680x1050 was the default), but under that setting, photos (wallpaper) don't fit the screen, also. it gets rather hard to move things around the desktop when the displays are two vastly different resolutions.

Amen to that

Where we're headed with this is we're going to edit your window managers/desktop environments startup to run xrandr and manually set the resolution when you start the X-server. There is already an Xrandr command somewhere in the startup (or else you would only be able to mirror the monitors), we just have to figure out where and modify it.
What Desktop/Window Manager do you use?

This isn't much of a desktop issue at the moment, but the WM I'm using is fluxbox.

It's not specifically a desktop issue, that's true. However, most folks are not too worried about having dual monitors when they are in a tty (the black and white screen you see prior to starting your desktop). It's significantly easier (and safer) to edit the ~/.fluxbox/startup file than it is to go into the X config, locate the monitor section and manually edit the Xservers config. If you mess that up, you're going to need to log in remotely to fix it.

if you could post the output of "xrandr -q", the resolution you want on each monitor and the positioning of the monitor (VGA1 to the left/right/over/under LCD1...

I'm currently looking at this guys solution if you want to jump ahead and give it a try. You can feed the xrandr commands into a terminal and they'll take effect, once you've got the string you want, put it in a shell script in fluxbox start-up and that's the monitors will appear from now on.

BTW, fluxbox isn't so much a desktop as it is a desktop project. If you like that kind of thing, you can build amazing tools out of it. If you don't, it just kind of sits there with that puke green "fixme" wallpaper, laughing at you. Trading speed and a light footprint for ease of use.

Here ya' go.

Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 2806 x 900, maximum 32767 x 32767
LVDS1 connected primary 1366x768+0+132 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 256mm x 144mm
1366x768 60.0*+
1360x768 59.8 60.0
1024x768 60.0
800x600 60.3 56.2
640x480 59.9
DP1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI1 connected 1440x900+1366+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 474mm x 296mm
1680x1050 60.0 +
1600x1200 60.0
1280x1024 75.0 60.0
1440x900 75.0* 59.9
1280x960 60.0
1152x864 75.0
1024x768 75.1 70.1 60.0
832x624 74.6
800x600 72.2 75.0 60.3 56.2
640x480 75.0 72.8 66.7 60.0
720x400 70.1
VGA1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)al
VIRTUAL1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

And I wanted my external display to the right of the laptop with both set to 1366x768.

SOLVED! - Seems like I had to make the screen dimension adjustments for my external display in the CLI. Talk about having to get your hands dirty every now & then. In case you were wondering, aRandR is a GUI front-end for xRandR and is quite nice, but it apparently doesn't let you do everything.