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Message from Steven
===================
> The machine is a 486DX4 with 16Mb RAM.  I divided hda 
> into a 16Mb swap disk and the rest as ext2.

I would recommend 32mb for swap on that machine,
especially if you intend using X.

> Maplin.co.uk have several PCMCIA-usb cards as described 
> below.  My plan was to use one to attach printer

BL3 happily drives a printer on the standard parallel 
printer port.  I have no idea whether it can drive a 
USB printer via a PCMCIA-USB port.

> memory cards

BL3 happily reads memory cards via PCMCIA sleeve.
I have no idea how to configure a PCMCIA-USB port
to do this.

> broadband router

BL3 happily networks to a broadband router via PCMCIA
network card.  I see potential problems trying to do
this via PCMCIA-USB port.

> and mouse.  

BL3 happily reads a mouse on PS/2 or COM port.  Again,
reading USB mouse via PCMCIA-USB port is problematical.

> Then divide a 1gig memory card into a big swap file 

As I understand it (I could be out of date), memory cards
only take a finite number of writes.  Using one for swap
risks wearing it out.  32mb swap is adequate for 16mb RAM.
More swap than that is not going to have a significant
effect on your 486.

> Clean boot test 
>   Boot from floppy
>   startx
>       Xsetup  A(640x480), P(PS2 mouse), 2(button)
>    results in  
>      _X11TranssocketUNIXConnect:can't connect errorno=111
>              xinit connection refused
>              xinit nosuch process (errno 3) Servier error.

It appears that Xvesa does not like your video hardware.
Please try the following:
----------------
Xvesa -listmodes
----------------
What does it tell you?

> Do I need to install a package first?

If it turns out that Xvesa is incompatible with your 
video hardware, we will need to install a compatible 
Xserver from Slackware 4.0.

However, don't give up on Xvesa yet.  

> Since the opening screen said that Slackware 4 packages 
> could be installed I assumed that that included pkgtool

pkgtool is part of the Slackware base.  The BL3 base 
is different.  Slackware 4.0 and BL3 have the same
base library, so executables from Slackware 4.0
should work on BL3.  However, packages that create 
the Slackware base, or expect components of the 
Slackware base not present in the BL3 base, will 
probably not work.

Cheers,
Steven