How do I determine which graphics card is being used?

[Chris Jones]

> Why not?  I've had varying experiences with various Linux distros. What's
> "broken" on one works fine on another.
>
>> The way to tell what your
>> video card is to in a terminal type lspci and that will list what it is.
>
> You've obviously not read this thread from the beginning.  I did that to
> start with and determined that the video card is recognized but wasn't
> being utilized due to (then) lack of a proprietary driver.

Not sure how long you have been on this list, but, how to put it, Karl 
isn't exactly renowned for giving good advice around here... Just ignore 
him.

Are you able to get hold of the Xorg log file when you try and run with 
the nvidia driver, to see how exactly things fail ?

Try Fedora is perhaps worth a shot, as you say a different distro, 
different issues... But given Fedora's position on 'non free' drivers 
etc., I would be surprised if it was better than ubuntu, but you never 
know til you try ...

Chris