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Sindi Keesan wrote:
>
> I read readme and noted that BL3 is supposed to work on a 
> 386 with 3M RAM.  

You definitely need swap to boot with 3mb RAM.  It will
be tight.  If that system takes a chunk of RAM for shadow
RAM, it might not boot.

> But the hard drive is 30M total and I certainly do not have 
> 25M free space on it.  Why do we need so much free disk space?  

To provide room for a large application (like Netscape 3.04).
I suggest you do df from inside BL3.  You will probably be
surprised.

> I looked in /usr/bin and found microcom.  Typing microcom --help 

Unfortunately, microcom does not recognize a help parameter.
To get help, do:
------------
man microcom
------------

> At some point I got some instructions to specify the com port 
> with microcom -D/dev/ttyS1 but when I did that it crashed.  

That doesn't sound good.  Are you sure it crashed?  When I did:
---------------------
microcom -D/dev/ttyS2       ## my modem is on COM3
---------------------
I got no acknowledment (just a blank screen).  But then I entered:
----
ati7
----
and got the expected output from the modem.

> This program is a nice surprise and I hope I can get it to work.

It's not user-friendly (because of the very small size)
but it does work for me.  

> I can't tell which ppp is in BL3.  

pppd --help

> Is there something I could do to adjust the timing to prevent 
> this failure?  

man pppd

> I am using the same ISP in which I got the failure with BL1 
> and the newer kernel, until I changed to the newer pppd, at 
> which point it dialed okay.  

Check /var/eznet/eznet.conf and make sure it is identical to
the one you use in BL2.

> mail  6 (Enter)  gives me a nice place to fill in To: and 
> Subject: lines and write a message.
> I don't see any way to fill in the From:  line.  

Your "From:" address goes in ~/.pmailrc (same as BL2).  It's
called "reply-to" but it actually appears in the "From:" when
your mail goes out.

> I typed 1 to 'configure POP3 and SMTP server' and got into 
> some screen that appears to be e3pi, with no instructions 
> for POP3 configuration, 

Thank you for finding that.  It's definitely a bug (caused by
a pico parameter that e3pi doesn't recognize).  I'll upload
a corrected version (3.01) in a day or two (to see if more
bugs come in).  If you want to fix it in your current copy:
------------------
edit /usr/bin/mail
------------------
and page-down to:    1) e3pi -w ~/.pmailrc
and change it to:    1) e3pi    ~/.pmailrc

> when I type 6 instead of the nice screen where I could fill 
> in To: I see 0/0 Term: 80x24 Pos=134595104 (etc.)

That's your (empty) inbox.  Press c to compose.

> X - can't get it to do anything despite having 32M RAM.  

Xvesa fails with some versions of HIMEM.SYS and SMARTDRV.
Try running DOS with no CONFIG.SYS and no AUTOEXEC.BAT

> Do I need to unzip the swap.zip file first?  

Definitely not.  It is only there for low RAM systems.

> I typed startx and chose 640 resolution by typing a, or A, 
> and nothing happened.  

Did you press ENTER after A?  If so, the next question should
be:  "Which port is your mouse on?"

> I have probably done almost everything wrong that a dummy 
> could do, but I will keep testing tomorrow.  

Thank you.

Cheers,
Steven