How can I make notifications appear on a specific monitor?

Solution 1:

For an imperfect workaround, install dconf-editor (provided by the package dconf-tools), navigate to Apps > notify-osd and change the value of multihead mode to focus-follow.

This will draw the volume notifications a little too high up on your left monitor, causing them to overlap the panel - but they will at least be drawn on your left monitor. Email/message/music/other notifications don't overlap and look fine using this method.

Solution 2:

It is currently not possible to change the location of the notifications. By the design they should appear in top-right corner of your primary screen, but because of this bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/notify-osd/+bug/331369

they will always appear on your most right monitor.

There used to be a patch to notify-osd by Roman (Leolik) Sukochev that allowed user to change behaviour of notification, but it was not ported to 12.04 yet.

Right now you can only wait for bug to be fixed or for new version of Leolik's patch or you can set your laptop monitor to be on right side.

ALSO: it does not matter in this case if your monitor is 'laptop' or external, so your question is a duplicate of: notify-osd and dual monitors as stated by user59621.