Running before I can walk with Graphic Drivers

[#1]

Ok decided to try and install graphic card drivers ubuntu 12.04 for an ATI Radeon 9600 and should have looked into it a bit more before embarking  Now I find out I should have disabled the built in drivers first and I'm not exactly sure which are installed  Anyway of checking?
The 9600 drivers are discontinued in ubuntu and in additional drivers it says no proprietary drivers are in use but I guess some drivers were being used previously or I'd have been looking at a blank screen  I downloaded ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver from the ati website which came as a text file. Unfortunately I couldn't access the installation instructions at the ati website, forbidden or something and I clicked text file thinking there would be some readme file in there. When I tried to close the box I got a message that some process was running so let it roll to stop anything getting corrupted.

[#2]

The ancient 9.3 Proprietary drivers are only compatible with Linux distributions dating from 2008 or earlier, they are not going to work on newer releases.
The built in drivers should be good enough for most things, considering the age of the Radeon 9600 I doubt you'd want to try playing any recent games on it anyway.

[#3]

I suspected that mate, the release date was 2009  anyway I can check and remove these drivers IF they have been installed. My other 2 systems have a 6800gt nvidia card and a 9800 radeon pro mobi cards. Will check to whether there is any point in using the manufacturer drivers this time as both are getting on a bit. Just in 12.04 no drivers are available it would appear on any of the systems I run.

[#4]

The drivers that you downloaded couldn't have installed anything unless you ran it with sudo.
"Details" in the GNOME control centre gives a little bit of info about the graphics, "glxinfo" in a terminal gives more details.

[#5]

In details in gnome it has changed from unknown to Gallium 0.4 on ATI RV350  so I'm guessing something has installed 
Any part of the details from glxinfo in particular I need to look at? was a bit dubious about posting it all there was a lot of info.

[#6]

Gallium is the name of a subsystem / framework within the built in open-source "mesa" drivers.
Regarding glxinfo, probably not much is particularly interesting, apart from "direct rendering: Yes" near the top.

[#7]

Thanks I'll take a look tomorrow when I get back to work.  What's generally the way to decide which drivers to use? Is it a case of finding which are the most up to date or actually trying both and seeing which has the least problems. 

[#8]

For Radeon graphics, the open-source drivers are pretty good, especially for older cards.
For nVidia, I don't think the open-source nouveau drivers are as far along, and the proprietary nvidia drivers are supposed to be pretty good.

[#9]

If I recall correctly the ATI drivers come as a self-extracting binary.  I'd chmod +x the binary and run it from the commandline as I think there's a license agreement to agree to.
ejs is correct in terms of driver status these days; the NVIDIA proprietary stuff is better than the free driver, and the radeon free stuff has come on leaps and bounds since they opened up the hardware.
Gricey.

[#10]

Quote

display: :0  screen: 0 direct rendering: Yes server glx vendor string: SGI server glx version string: 1.4 server glx extensions:     GLX_ARB_multisample, GLX_EXT_import_context, GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap,     GLX_EXT_visual_info, GLX_EXT_visual_rating, GLX_MESA_copy_sub_buffer,     GLX_OML_swap_method, GLX_SGI_swap_control, GLX_SGIS_multisample,     GLX_SGIX_fbconfig, GLX_SGIX_pbuffer, GLX_SGIX_visual_select_group,     GLX_INTEL_swap_event client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI client glx version string: 1.4 client glx extensions:     GLX_ARB_create_context, GLX_ARB_create_context_profile,     GLX_ARB_get_proc_address, GLX_ARB_multisample, GLX_EXT_import_context,     GLX_EXT_visual_info, GLX_EXT_visual_rating, GLX_EXT_framebuffer_sRGB,     GLX_EXT_create_context_es2_profile, GLX_MESA_copy_sub_buffer,     GLX_MESA_multithread_makecurrent, GLX_MESA_swap_control,     GLX_OML_swap_method, GLX_OML_sync_control, GLX_SGI_make_current_read,     GLX_SGI_swap_control, GLX_SGI_video_sync, GLX_SGIS_multisample,     GLX_SGIX_fbconfig, GLX_SGIX_pbuffer, GLX_SGIX_visual_select_group,     GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap, GLX_INTEL_swap_event GLX version: 1.4

That's the first bit from glxinfo if you need any more let me know. Can someone clear up some terminology please? I'm under the impression open source is the ones from the manufacturer and proprietary is the one's built into ubuntu out the box but does that include any in additional drivers? Like I mentioned there was none available in additional although there was some when I had 10.04 installed on here. Perhaps the additional drivers have now been integrated into 12.04 as standard 
Gricey, the drivers I downloaded came as a shell script (application/x-shellscript), I wasn't asked for the license agreement just clicked the file and some process started running on it's own. So still not 100% sure if it has installed. Seems like what you and ejs are saying it shouldn't have the way I went about it but in details it has changed from unknown graphics card so something has changed

[#11]

Quote from: AverageWhiteBloke

Can someone clear up some terminology please? I'm under the impression open source is the ones from the manufacturer and proprietary is the one's built into ubuntu out the box but does that include any in additional drivers?

Wrong way around - the open source drivers are the ones shipped in all Linux distributions.
The proprietary, binary only, closed source ones are available direct from the manufacturer, or from a third party non-free repository like rpmfusion for Fedora.
Like I said originally - the 9.3 binary drivers won't work on modern releases of Linux distributions. They might have worked on 10.04, it depends on the versions of the kernel and xorg-server.

[#12]

Ahh thanks for clearing that up so I guess I can't have installed anything.  The rest of the post makes sense now I know which way round it is. 

[#13]

Quote from: ejs

Wrong way around - the open source drivers are the ones shipped in all Linux distributions.

Objection!
Some open source drivers/software can rely on binary 'blobs', and such drivers/software will not be found (by default) in any Debian distribution. Wireless firmwares are a good example of this. (Along with the firmware for my DVB-S2 card). While they can easily be installed, they are not shipped in the default install.

[#14]

The linux-firmware package on Fedora includes firmware for every generation of radeon card from R100 to beyond R700 to the generations with all sorts of island names. I've got a TV tuner stick where the firmwares aren't even shipped, you have to get them yourself. OK well, there's a script to extract and generate one of them from the Windows drivers.

[#15]

Quote from: AverageWhiteBloke

Gricey, the drivers I downloaded came as a shell script (application/x-shellscript), I wasn't asked for the license agreement just clicked the file and some process started running on it's own. So still not 100% sure if it has installed. Seems like what you and ejs are saying it shouldn't have the way I went about it but in details it has changed from unknown graphics card so something has changed

Your best bet for those is to open up a terminal, navigate to the thing you downloaded (did it end in .run by any chance?) and run it e.g. ./foobar.run - then you might end up with interactive console output.  I know both ATI and NVIDIA vendor-supplied drivers did this at one point.
Gricey.