Terminal Command to tell what graphics driver is being used

[nxn00b]

What command can I enter to find out what graphics driver my laptop is using? (Ubuntu)

[MikeTbob]

If it's a PCI device

sudo lspci -k

[nxn00b]

Well the graphics are actually onboard (apologies for not being specific), but the command you provided actually gave me the device name Radeon Xpress 200m, but no device driver name which is odd.

With that said, I think I'm going to create a new thread to attend to the main problem at hand.

Thanks for the command Mike.

[coopstah13]

that command should still tell you...

05:02.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV44A [GeForce 6200] (rev a1)
	Kernel driver in use: nvidia

this is what I see on my machine

[nxn00b]

It reads this under the vga controller section:

01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RC410 [Radeon Xpress 200M]

From my standpoint as an absolute noob, it seems there are two drivers one is proprietary and the other is open source.

I elaborated a bit further on my situation in another thread, but basically I'm running Sabayon temporarily because Ubuntu was freezing on compiz enable, yet Sabayon is working great on default. So I'm using this distro as a basis to get the right Ubuntu driver and if need be, configuration.

Using the package manager I found that it is using xf86-video-ati. That should be the one, but as far as being referenced in the output of that command, nope.

Thanks for your reply by the way.

[Mudgen]

lspci shows the hardware. lsmod shows the loaded driver modules. But you'd have to know what driver you were looking for, it won't specifically call out the video driver.

[MikeTbob]

That command will only tell you the driver, if there is a driver/module loaded or available for it.

From the lspci man pages

-k Show kernel drivers handling each device and also kernel modules capable of handling it. Turned on by default when -v is given in the normal mode of output. (Currently works only on Linux with kernel 2.6 or newer.)

[Mudgen]

Should have known better, MikeTbob, than to contradict you. Tired eyes looked at the display controller output, not the graphics controller.

[MikeTbob]

Should have known better, MikeTbob, than to contradict you. Tired eyes looked at the display controller output, not the graphics controller.

Ah, hogwash, I sometimes contradict myself!

[SkipDaShu]

skip@c17-desktop:~$ sudo lspci -k
gives me:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G92 [GeForce GTS 250] (rev a2)
	Kernel driver in use: nvidia
	Kernel modules: nvidia, nvidiafb
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G92 [GeForce GTS 250] (rev a2)
	Kernel driver in use: nvidia
	Kernel modules: nvidia, nvidiafb

Which is THE answer but... IF you want the answer that looks more like:
NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-195.36.24 you need to run nvidia-settings for nvid cards (under X Server Info) or aticonfig for ATI cards (although I can't recall how you get it out of aticonfig at the momement).