How may I know if my devices have their drivers installed?

Question

I have a Dell N4110 laptop, and I want to know if the drivers are installed and working well.

For example, with my touchpad, in windows it has multi-touch gestures, so that I can scroll or zoom with two fingers (like an ipod). However in Ubuntu, only the right side works as a scroll bar.

So maybe one driver is installed, but I need other one that uses my devices well, and the graphics card, I have no idea if it is well installed or not. I have an Intel 3000HD graphics card.

Is there something like the device manager in Windows, or another way to know if a device is driverless or if the device might have a better driver?

Answer 1

In a nutshell:

Since you have Intel graphics, then you have the driver you need already.

As for other components, Ubuntu will inform you if there are missing drivers for certain components, such as your wireless devices. If you are unsure, you can run jockey-gtk and it will run a check for you.

If you need to see the details of what you have installed, there are two options:

GUI (Graphical interface):

Install [hardinfo ![enter image description here">

This gives you a detailed readout of everything on your system, including driver information for your devices.

It won't tell you if there are newer drivers available, but that's not really a problem because on Linux the drivers usually come with the Kernel, so you don't really need to "upgrade" your drivers (except for certain drivers that are not included because they are proprietary).

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CLI (Command-Line-Interface):

You can run sudo lshw to get a detailed readout of your system on the commandline:

My recommendation is that you pipe the output to a file though as it can be rather hefty. So, run:

touch sysinfo.txt
sudo lshw > sysinfo.txt

You can then view this file at your leisure:

gedit sysinfo.txt

or

nano sysinfo.txt

As izx mentioned in the comments, any device marked as UNCLAIMED has no driver.

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For your touchpad, you just need to change the settings. Open System Settings>Mouse & Touchpad, and under the "Touchpad" tab, you can set up two-finger scrolling.