This paper proposes a novel efficient method to analyze the ergodic channel capacity of cooperative amplify-and-forward relay systems. This is accomplished by employing a very tight approximate moment generating function of the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio that is applicable to various fading environments, including mixed and composite fading channels. Three adaptive source transmission policies are considered: constant power with optimal rate adaptation, optimal joint power and rate adaptation, and fixed rate with truncated channel inversion. Closed-form expressions for ergodic capacity under these policies are derived for Nakagami-m fading with independent but not identically distributed statistics. The accuracy of the proposed approximate method is validated through existing results and Monte Carlo simulations.