Installing Ubuntu and Subversion

Ahh, Ubuntu.  The operating system of champions!  Or the red-headed stepchild of operating systems, depending on who you talk to.  There is a network guy where I intern who foams at the mouth whenever I praise the virtues of switching over to Ubuntu.  In any case, I love it and have been using it for years...probably since Cloverfield came out if I had to put a date on it.  So when the assignment came down from headquarters to install both Ubuntu and Subversion on my machine, I already had Ubuntu set up and ready to go.  And as for installing Subversion, it was already installed for a project from last semester.

Because these tasks were already accomplished, I decided to blog about the dilemma that I faced when I purchased a new laptop last Spring.   My new laptop came with Windows 7 installed on it, which presented me with a decision to make:

1) Change my allegiance
2) Dual-boot
3) Blow away the machine and run Ubuntu
4) Or run either one on a virtual machine

The first option was not even worth considering, so that left only three real choices.  The only problem that I have with partitioning my hard drive and dual-booting is that it would limit me to only running one at a time.  So nix on that one.  And because I'm forced to use Windows at work, it did not make sense to only run Ubuntu.  I sometimes do homework there (only during lunch!) at my workstation, and from a file-transfer point of view keeping Windows in some capacity seemed to make sense.  Plus I sometimes write batch files at home to automate some of the things I need to do at work.  So my eventual decision was to install VirtualBox and run Ubuntu as a virtual machine.

This process was as easy as these things get.  I burned a copy of the latest version of Ubuntu to a dvd (11.04 at the time) and then installed using VirtualBox.  It was a very intuative, step-by-step experience.
So that left Subversion to deal with.  I already had this installed on Ubuntu from last semester, and all that was needed was to create a new repository for our project (imaginatively named classProject2).  I then pointed my svn client to the new URL supplied by the department's system admin.  Done!