Ubuntu 12.04: ATI Mobility Radeon X1300 drivers

Question

I am new to linux. I would like my machine to make full use (perfomance wise) of the x1300, but I am not sure how/and which drivers to install. Doing lspci -nn | grep VGA gives me:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI M52 [Mobility Radeon X1300] [1002:7149]

Details on my machine however give me Graphics: Unknown. I took a look at this, but i am still a bit confused how to continue. Help much appriciated.

Answer 1

That page is obsolete, however at 3/4 you find the heading 'Testing The Driver' with this command

# dmesg | grep drm

The output should include 'radeon'.

Rationale for this: There are two drivers for any ATI video card, either the proprietary fglrx driver or the Open Source Radeon driver. Usually the Radeon driver is used by default not having you the change any setting. This is what you will test with the command. Should you prefer the other driver (usually only if you are running graphics intensive games) search for documentation on installing it. There are some catches with the proprietary driver (it usually doesn't work with current version of X11 and it doesn't work with Gnome3) so my advice would be to stick to Radeon.