Synaptic access forbidden errors

Q I'm setting up a computer for an absolute newbie. He lives very remotely and I will probably never actually meet him. Without him having anyone in his area who knows Linux, I want his computer to be set up to be as newbie-friendly as possible. Two questions then... Firstly, in the Network Device Control interface are seen eth0 and also the external modem, ppp0. This is what we will be using to initiate dial-up. At the moment, eth0 is at the top and therefore selected by default. How do I change this so that the modem is the top of the list? I think there's a config file. Secondly, I want my friend to update through Synaptic as I have found up2date to be extremely temperamental. But Synaptic is having problems downloading files it recommends for updates. A lot of repositories like http://ayo.freshrpms.net are giving 'access forbidden' and such like. What's going on? It lists files that should be updated and then seems to time out or say they are not there or just give 'access denied' on download. I'm using Fedora - don't ask why!

A The order of the devices in Network Device Control should not matter, although you will want to remove the default route from the Ethernet device before moving to the modem. /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ contains the actual boot time scripts for the various devices, so you can completely disable eth0 by changing the ONBOOT flag within ifcfg-eth0. You can use the yum package manager to manage RPM-based distributions, although up2date should just work on Fedora. It sounds like Synaptic is having some problems locating the correct updates and downloading them, but verifying each specific URL that it's trying and figuring out what it's trying to do is the best place to start. I would highly recommend using yum, as it is really easy to use and can be used to update a system very quickly.

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