Need to find out the name of the graphics card and and if driver is installed?

Question

I am using Mint 12 on a lenovo machine. How do I find the exact name of my graphics card to download and install driver? Also is there any way to check if the driver is already installed or not?

Answer 1

One way:

Install the lshw tool with sudo apt-get install lshw lshw-gtk

Invoke the tool in the terminal with: sudo lshw

Answer 2

The easiest way is to use lspci:

lspci | grep VGA

On my system, this returns:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT216 [Quadro FX 880M] (rev a2)

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To check which driver is loaded run this for NVIDIA cards:

lsmod | grep nv

and this for ATI cards (will return nothing if the proprietary driver is not loaded):

lsmod | grep radeon

Answer 3

I went to software manager and installed "Sysinfo". Once installed you can open it and click on Hardware and a box will appear in the upper right-hand corner that will give you options of details on your Motherboard,Graphics card,Sound card and Network. I have used terminal before but for those of us with bad memories, the graphical interface is very handy.