Tweaking the front page

By default the front page of my blog displays the most recent posts, but I’d like to have an introduction page instead. I’ve created a page (Musings home) but how do I set that to be the default start page for the blog?

Also, I’ve tried to order the pages in Mange Pages but it doesn’t seem to alter them, so how do I specify the order for them to be listed in my sidebar? I realise I could code that into sidebar.php but it seems to be more sensible for simply call the pages anbd to have someway of defining the order.