My ISP uses a proxy firewall, and SVN will not work thru it or around it. Requests for the proxy to accomodate subversion have brought no action. I finally found tips for using subversion through an http firewall at: http://www.bluemarsh.com/java/subversion.html,

Desproxy homepage is http://desproxy.sourceforge.net, and downloads are at http://sourceforge.net/projects/desproxy. Packages are available for many distributions.

The following schemes for svn checkout and update work for me. Each task could probably be put into a single script by running desproxy as a background process. I haven't tried that yet.

#===================================
# checkout

# in xterm1, as root:
desproxy svn.freepascal.org 80 proxy3.webstorm.co.za 8080 1023

# in xterm2, as root:
. cdsvn # change to svn directory
svn co http://localhost:1023/svn/fpc/trunk fpc
svn co http://localhost:1023/svn/lazarus/trunk/ lazarus cd fixes
svn co http://localhost:1023/svn/fpc/branches/fixes_2_0 fpc

# in xterm1, as root:
ctrl-C

#===================================
# update

# __NOTE__:
# The url used during checkout is stored in each ".svn/entries" file, # so desproxy setup for update must be identical to that of checkout.

# in xterm1, as root:
desproxy svn.freepascal.org 80 proxy3.webstorm.co.za 8080 1023

# in xterm2, as root:
. cdsvn # change to svn directory
svn update fpc
svn update lazarus
cd fixes
svn update fpc

# in xterm1, as root:
ctrl-C

#===================================

Thanks to Miguelanxo Otero Salgueiro for creating desproxy, and to Nathan for his tips at http://www.bluemarsh.com/java/subversion.html,