compiling on a PPC

[Technomage Hawke]

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