Fedora Installation :: PYCURL ERROR 6 "Cannot Retrieve Repository Metadata"

I wanted to get some additional life out of a computer with 256MB of RAM, and discovered that FC12 was the only version of Linux I was able to install (out of the distros attempted). The installer went into text mode automatically, configuring only the root account. I used text-based tools after the first boot to configure networking, and installed a couple of additional packages with yum. Then I issued "yum update," and it retrieved and installed the available updates. That was the last time I used yum successfully, though. I obtained such error messages as "14: PYCURL ERROR 6" and "Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: fedora. verify its path and try again."

I discovered that such problems had been encountered by others, and had sometimes been solved by such methods as adding repositories to yum.conf, adding lines to /etc/hosts, adding a line to resolv.conf, tampering with fedora.repo or fedora updates.repo, or even with "yum clean all." None of these methods worked for me, however. My initial impression of Fedora is favorable, so I might like to try it even on a system where it wasn't the only available choice. Package management is essential to success with any OS, however, so I need to get past this issue.