Installed with Synaptic but not recognizing my card.

Intel GPUs work great in Linux. Intel put a lot of time and money into Linux kernel development as well as the video driver.

Can you give the output of:

sudo lshw -C display; lsb_release -a; uname -a; dpkg -l | grep intel

Thanks

What originally got me started down the road to try to get specific drivers for my card running was it not properly recognizing my external monitors max resolution settings. I eventually got a workaround for it using xrandr in a script on startup.

Then I started having problems with overheating and forced shutdowns when I was doing some multi-tasking with multiple Chrome tabs and some streaming music. One of the suggested fixes online was possibly getting specific drivers or even proprietary for the graphics card, so I have restarted my quest for drivers since as far as I can tell I'm using generic ones since the 'Details' under system settings says the graphics driver is 'unknown'

Again, I'm still new-ish to Linux, but I am a long time geek so I catch on quick.

Here's the output from: sudo lshw -C display; lsb_release -a; uname -a; dpkg -l | grep intel

  *-display:0
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: 2
       bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
       version: 07
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=i915 latency=0
       resources: irq:45 memory:fc000000-fc3fffff memory:d0000000-dfffffff ioport:1800(size=8)
  *-display:1 UNCLAIMED
       description: Display controller
       product: Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: 2.1
       bus info: pci@0000:00:02.1
       version: 07
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list
       configuration: latency=0
       resources: memory:fc400000-fc4fffff
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Release: 12.04
Codename: precise
Linux matthubuntu 3.2.0-29-generic #46-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 27 17:03:23 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
ii intel-gpu-tools 1.2-1 tools for debugging the Intel graphics driver
ii libdrm-intel1 2.4.32-1ubuntu1 Userspace interface to intel-specific kernel DRM services -- runtime
ii libva-intel-vaapi-driver 1.0.15-1ubuntu2 VAAPI driver for Intel G45 & HD Graphics family
ii whois 5.0.15ubuntu2 intelligent WHOIS client
rc xserver-xorg-video-intel 2:2.19.0-0ubuntu1~xup1 X.Org X server -- Intel i8xx, i9xx display driver

From my perspective, it appears that the Intel driver is running based on that output, but I guess Ubuntu doesn't recognize it in the system settings.

Try:

sudo dpkg -P xserver-xorg-video-intel
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel

Reboot to test

I began to have a problem with ubuntu only booting in Unity 2D, so I uninstalled the VAAPI driver and installed xserver-xorg-video-intel as suggested, that fixed the Unity booting issue, but still running pretty hot.

Ps. this is often noticed when running Chrome with many tabs going.