Why doesn't 12.04 recognize my ATI Radeon X300SE graphics card?

Question

So far everything including the BCM4321 card is working, however, the OEM ATI Radeon X300SE (RV370) is not recognized. When I go into system details the card comes up as unknown.

When I run lspci the card shows up as:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV370 5B60 [Radeon X300 (PCIE)] 01:00.1 Display controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV370 [Radeon X300SE]

I have attempted check Additional Drivers but the card does not show up as needing a driver.

So far this is causing the system to run warmer as the processor is doing a bit of the work to run Unity and any full screen videos tend to be rather choppy.

Is there an available driver that will fix my issue and what is the install method?

I am not scared to run a terminal so no worries there, as long as I have instructions, I can find my way.

I am running under 12.04 LTS Kernel 3.2.0-25-generic-pae

Solution

I upgraded from 10.04 and found similar problems (dual screen didn't work properly, etc.) No suggestions from the "Additional Drivers" either.

Looks like the package xserver-xorg-video-ati didn't get installed in my upgrade. Installed that and things started working properly. It won't show up in the "Additional Drivers" System Settings application.

cat /etc/debian_version 

wheezy/sid

uname -a

Linux zippy 3.2.0-30-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP Fri Aug 24 16:52:48 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

sudo lshw -C video |grep product

   product: RV370 5B60 [Radeon X300 (PCIE)]
   product: RV370 [Radeon X300SE]

dpkg --list xserver-xorg-video-ati

Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
 | Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
 |/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
 ||/ Name           Version        Description
 +++-==============-==============-============================================
 ii  xserver-xorg-v 1:6.14.99~git2 X.Org X server -- AMD/ATI display driver wra

Hope this helps.