Do I need any AMD Radeon driver for fedora 20?

Question

This is the first time I am using AMD products, so I am not sure.

I have a laptop which has AMD Radeon 8240 (with 512MB graphics memory) and I have just installed fedora 20.

Do I need any driver for it?

Solution

You should have the open source driver installed by default. An easy way to check is

lsmod | grep radeon 

radeon is the open source driver for AMD/ATI cards, the command above will check to see if it is loaded. The Fedora installation should have detected your card and installed the driver automatically.

If that driver does everything you need, then fine. If not, you can also install AMD's proprietary driver, fglrx.

Comments

[Sandeep Bansal]

The newest distributions of linux usually have an open source driver that let's you use AMD Graphics cards. But If you want to control fan speeds and overclock it then you'll need to install the official AMD Drivers. The reason I'm putting this as a comment is because I'm not 100% certain, things can change.

[khajvah]

@SandeepBansal I prefer open source. Is there any way to check if I have a driver installed?

[khajvah]

How could I not check it with lsmod :D. Thanks a lot!