a few random hardware questions

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, Oct 07, 2004 at 08:16:10PM -0400, volvoguy wrote:

> 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.

The 7500 is supported quite well with the stock, open source "ati" driver
(the one you're using).  I have such a card, and 3D (DRI) and everything is
supported out of the box.

> <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.

Those messages are being printed by an application (mplayer?), and they
indicate that while your CPU supports these features, they are disabled in
the application.

-- 
 - mdz