rkonrad wrote:The journey now begins to find any an appropriate driver
I don't have a specific answer that will help, but I am in the middle of a similar issue myself so maybe my general info may be of use. There is an interaction between various modules in the video software so it is helpful to have some idea of the complexity before you can reduce it to simple steps.
In my experience it is not just as simple as clicking on the right driver and watching it install. Nor is it as simple as clicking a .pet that supposedly contains the correct driver (you might get lucky, but only if the person who made that .pet shares the identical video card hardware, firmware and linux kernel as you do)
Basically what you have to achieve is this:
1) Locate the manufacturers driver for your video card
2) Work out which kernel you have (type uname -r in a console)
3) Compile the manufacturers driver against your kernel (which may involve temporarily accessing the "devx" kernel that matches what you are using)
4) Load the driver correctly
5) Configure xorg.conf correctly
Apparently the compile steps are not difficult, but the xorg setup can be tricky.
It will become important to have an understanding of how the Xorg server decides which driver is active.
The video driver which is currently in use is specified by the xorg.conf file in the /etc/x11 folder. However, the behaviour of this file is rather problematic in my experience. The file does not always stay the same. There are circumstances under which Xorg will discard the changes you make to the file, and overwrite it.
This can cause endless problems with trying to figure out why your changes don't seem to work.
Also, it is important to remember that Xorg is able to "fallback" to basic settings if it detects that something in the xorg.conf file does not match your hardware. This means that there are at least two modes that will appear to work on your machine - firstly the fallback mode, and secondly the accelerated mode (...and there are various different levels of accleleration too. 2D and 3D accel are achieved by different methods)
There is also a .pet called something like xorg_high (which may be worth a try if you don't want to go the whole compile route just yet). The xorg_high driver is a step up from the fallback driver, but a step below true 3D acceleration based on the full (and correctly compiled) driver from the manufacturer.
The fact that only one Puppy has the correct fallback settings suggests that your video card may be a little "touchy" so it might be tricky to find the driver/xorg.conf combo that works well for you.
I recommend that you keep any important data off this machine until you have finished experimenting with the video as it is likely that you will have to work through a lot of config/reboot/reinstall.
Hopefully you will have time to do some research throughout this forum because there is a large patchwork of valuable info about how Xorg works - it's just that different people know different things depending on what happened with their particular hardware.
I recommend making a copy of the xorg.conf file that you can currently find in /etc/x11. This file will contain the fallback settings and driver name that currently work on your system. It may contain useful info, and in any case you may need to reinstall it at various times during the troubleshooting, or you may want to copy it over to any other puppy that has not succeeded in generating a working xorg.conf