The driver X server is using can be seen from the X configuration file, which is /etc/X11/xorg.conf for Xorg, or if you're using XFree86, it's /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 (or the same without
-4 for some older XFrees). So, open up that file and scroll down to the section where screen devices are defined; there's a driver line that holds the driver name.
vga is the "basic" driver, but for ATI Radeons the software drivers
ati and possibly
radeon tend to work too, though they don't provide hardware accelaration. For that you'd need
fglrx driver, which can be downloaded from ATI's site (the newest driver there might not work with older cards, so read the release notes before installing) or, more preferably, from some prepackaged binary package source for your distribution.
Installing the driver depends on the driver version and provider, so read the release notes. After the installation your X's config file must be rewritten (the screen/device part), at least the driver name must be changed, and often the driver installer can do this automatically, taking the old configuration as the base of the new one.
So:
1) see the working driver: read /etc/X11/xorg.conf (or XF86Config-4)
2) use Google to determine which driver you need; I don't recommend installing hardware drivers unless they're really needed, since on some configurations that might result in the screen going into power-saving or something, which forces you to use a boot disk to recover the problem etc.
3) if you inted to install the driver, read the README and release notes specific to that driver version - carefully. Make backups if needed, and only then proceed.
If the radeon driver (kernel driver, that is) is not in the kernel, check out if you've got the module available:
Code:
lsmod
### see if it's listed, probably not
modprobe -l | grep radeon
If you got it in the above list (modprobe -l), load it:
if it wasn't there, and it isn't in the kernel already (built-in), you need to rebuild your kernel. More information: kernel.org