I got rid of my G4 several years ago.  It was running Debian at the time.
First thing that comes to mind to find out if Altivec is on there is:
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep altivec

From IBM's site on a Power 7 processor and RHEL:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/LinuxP/RHEL+5.5+Checklist+for+POWER7

#cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep cpu -m 1
cpu             : POWER6 (architected), altivec supported

Not sure about the back-end compiler.  A quick search brought up distcc.
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/cross-compiling-distcc.xml

-Ben


On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 12:33 AM, Technomage Hawke
<technomage.hawke@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ok,
> I am not as familiar with the PPC arch as I should be. the CPU in my powerbook is a G3 750. according to a couple of searches, this chip comes with AltiVec instructions. However, the version of linux (Ubuntu 10.10) was apparently not compiled with that option in mind.
>
> my question is: how can I determine if the CPU in my machine is capable of using Altivec and if so, how can I setup a compiler back-end to offload the lion's share of the compiling to?
>
> -Eric
>
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