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I have just installed Ubuntu 10.04. My CPU usage is high when I do trivial things such as scrolling through a PDF file. So I think my video driver is not properly installed.

I want to confirm that by checking the information of my currently installed video driver, such as if there's a driver installed and what version it is. Then I could decide whether to install a new one if it is not up to date.

On Windows, I could use the device manager, how to do that on Ubuntu Linux? I don't expect a GUI solution for this. Command line will be just good enough.

Many thanks.

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Feb 25 '11 at 14:58

3 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

In Linux, there is two parts for the video driver, the kernel part and the X server part.

  1. Let's identify your hardware first. By typing lspci | grep VGA in a terminal, you should see a line with you graphic card description (even if not configured at all).
  2. Let's check the correct kernel driver is loaded find /dev -group video.
  3. Let's check the correct X driver is loaded glxinfo | grep -i vendor.

If you want more help, I would like the result of following commands: (Remember, never trust command line that people ask you to execute without knowing what it does.)

lspci | grep VGA ; lsmod | grep "kms\|drm" ; find /dev -group video ; \
cat /proc/cmdline ; find /etc/modprobe.d/; cat /etc/modprobe.d/*kms* ; \
ls /etc/X11/xorg.conf ; glxinfo | grep -i "vendor\|rendering" ; \
grep LoadModule /var/log/Xorg.0.log
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Is this tow part thing the linux video driver model? – smwikipedia Feb 14 '11 at 16:20
If you copy-paste the last 4 lines in a terminal and add the result at the end of your question (edit), it will be easier to answer your question. But remember not to execute untrusted commands. Perhaps some stackoverflow trusted users could proof read them and acknowledge in comments. – shellholic Feb 15 '11 at 0:31
up vote 2 down vote

I use this command to see what Xorg is currently using:

egrep -i " connected|card detect|primary dev" /var/log/Xorg.0.log
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up vote 0 down vote

I'm running a 64bit Ubuntu 10.04 here. Here's what I found out:

lspci will give you a list of found devices. Usually the video card is listed as "VGA controller" or somesuch, on my system it says:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G92 [GeForce 9800 GTX] (rev a2)

If you meant X.org's video driver, see /etc/X11/xorg.conf and look for Driver in Section "Device" (there might be multiple):

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "GeForce 9800 GTX/9800 GTX+"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device1"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "GeForce 9800 GTX/9800 GTX+"
    BusID          "PCI:1:0:0"
    Screen          1
EndSection

If you need to find out the specific location of driver-file and version X.org's using, try cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log and look for line which says something like LoadModule "'Driver in the Device-section of xorg.conf', in my case:

(II) LoadModule: "nvidia"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/nvidia_drv.so
(II) Module nvidia: vendor="NVIDIA Corporation"
    compiled for 4.0.2, module version = 1.0.0
    Module class: X.Org Video Driver
(II) NVIDIA dlloader X Driver  195.36.24  Thu Apr 22 19:18:54 PDT 2010
(II) NVIDIA Unified Driver for all Supported NVIDIA GPUs
(II) Primary Device is: PCI 01@00:00:0
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