a few random hardware questions

[volvoguy]

Hi folks! 

I can't tell you guys how happy I am with Ubuntu so far! I've only had
to boot into WIndows to play my favorite game (Age of Mythology - and
no, it doesn't run under any of the Wine type products) since I
installed Ubuntu on the day the preview came out - and I think that's
pretty good for a graphic/web designer who usually goes into withdrawl
without Photoshop. :)

I have a few minor things that I'm curious about, that I haven't been
able to figure out. The first involves my video card - an ATI Radeon
7500. I tried playing around with the directions on the wiki, but I
think that driver only supports the Radeon 8500 and up. It looks like
there is support for the 7500 with the stuff at dri.sourceforge.net,
but I don't see those packages available in Synaptic (with universe
available). Because video performance seems to be better with Ubuntu
than with other distros, I'm wondering if the DRI stuff is already
installed and working. Right now I'm still just using the generic
"ati" driver in my XF86Config-4 file, which is what I've always used
in other distros.

If my perceived video performance is just psychological, can anyone
offer some suggestions about getting the DRI stuff working? As I said,
2D performance is wonderful, but when I try anything 3D related
(glxgears, foobilliards, etc), things slow down dramatically.

I also noticed in the dmesg info that it looks like my AGP 4x card is
only running in 1x mode. Is this supposed to be how it works?

<snip from dmesg>
[drm] Initialized radeon 1.11.0 20020828 on minor 0: ATI Technologies
Inc Radeon RV200 QW [Radeon 7500]
agpgart: Found an AGP 3.0 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
agpgart: Device is in legacy mode, falling back to 2.x
agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 1x mode
agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 1x mode
</snip>

Second question. While trying to figure out where I saw the above
information, I peeked in the .xsession-errors file and noticed this
about my CPU:

<snip from .xsession-errors>
CPU: Intel Pentium 4/Xeon/Celeron Northwood 2808 MHz (Family: 8, Stepping: 3)
Detected cache-line size is 64 bytes
MMX2 supported but disabled
SSE supported but disabled
SSE2 supported but disabled
CPUflags:  MMX: 1 MMX2: 0 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 0 SSE2: 0
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX
</snip>

I would have thought that my P4 2.8Ghz w/HT processor could use MMX2
(SSE stuff is for AMD, right?). I'm currently using the
"linux-686-smp" kernel.

It's entirely possible that I'm just reading into these messages too
much, but I wanted to ask the experts. :)

I'm extremely pleased with CPU performance and 2D graphic performance,
but if I can get better 3D video performance, I'd be thrilled.
Hopefully the work involved in making that happen so I can play
foobilliards will be easier than trying to carry a real pool table
into my apartment. :)

Thank you for this awesome mailing list!

Aaron

PS - Let me know if any other log files or error messages are needed
to answer these questions!