video card replaced

[Hans Christian Andersen]

Than you to all ubuntu volunteers for an extremely user friendly distro.
Does anyone know of a log telling which video card (no documentation is
at hand) is installed? I need to know some details in order to do a
proper configuration of X.
On some computers shortly after switching it on you get a brief message
on the screen from the video card with its name before messages from the
BIOS and the motherboard and ubuntu linux gets loaded. But sometimes you
don't. In such cases I am not able to configure X, and a reinstall is
necessary. This must be possible to do in a more elegant way!