Hi,
I used to tune my wife's violin all the time before she decided to give it a go herslef. She manages fine now.
They are quite tricky to tune because of the tuning pegs. They should make them like guitar tuning pegs, no idea why they dont but I am sure there will be a good reason.
OK, The way I do it.
When I tighten the string up to roughly what it should be by the use of a tuner, one that tunes through vobrations I then push the peg in by pushing and twisting to keep it in place. The you use the fine tune adjust at the other end. Sometimes it gets very annoying when the fine tune is already as tight or as loose as it can go and you have to then readjust the main tuning peg after adjusting the fine tuning part.
She has an electric violin as well as an acoustic and this has no fine tuning on it and is near impossible to tune and keep it in tune, so we dont use that. I should sell it on some auction site that I got it off.
As for the strings, it is just tuned the same way as a mandolin ( violinists usually make pretty good mandolin players from what i have seen)
From the top ( thickest) to the bottom ( thinnest) it is as james says it is.
Make sure you have plenty of resin on your bow too or it will just screech along the strings or worse it will slide over and not make much noise at all.
Good luck, I gave up trying this instrument after 15 minutes
Ken
ye get some that are cut out for the job and others just get by from pretending