Hi Robin,
You're in luck, this is actually fairly simply to do. The hover effect is purely CSS; the basket is actually there all the time, but only shows when the pointer hovers over it.
If you go to your skin folder and find the template.css file, you can find the minibasket CSS near the bottom.
If you find these two lines:
#minibasket #minibasket_main { visibility: hidden; z-index: 111; height: 0px; width: 200px; text-align: left; margin-top: -13px; position: absolute; letter-spacing: 0; }
#minibasket:hover #minibasket_main { visibility: visible; height: auto; position: absolute; background-color: #777; border: solid 1px #666; padding: 40px 8px 8px 8px; margin-left: 12px; z-index: 500; }
You can see that the first one sets the visibility of main area of the basket to hidden. The second line handles the hover on the minibasket, setting the main area visible.
If you remove the visibility: hidden; from the first style, then remove the second style, you should have the basket visible all the time.
You'll then find another issue in that it is absolutely positioned, so it kind of covers other content rather than flows in it. If you search those minibasket styles for this,
position: absolute;
and change to
position: relative;
This should address this.
You'll probably need to play around with some other styles, and may decide to move the minibasket control in the Template.master to another place, add a side column, etc.
We're working on more v2 skins, but in the mean time I have added some v1.4 ones to the download page. These should be largely v2 compatible. The black and orange one and classic ones have multiple column format, so you might find those useful in seeing how the CSS and Template.master is for such a layout.