Kdesvn and Kompare are two very nice tools providing rich GUI's for svn and file comparison respectively.

In order to show the difference between two revisions using Kompare, change the default external diff settings to:
kompare %1 %2

It's often handy to look at the changes made by a commit ignoring whitespace changes.

This is often required when a dveloper has made some formatting changes and you just want to see the functional differences.

svn diff --diff-cmd diff -x -uw


Version conflicts to be aware of

Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) now ships with Subversion 1.5 

You can't use a svn 1.4 client and a svn 1.5 client on the same working copy.

While the subversion integration in Eclipse is great I still prefer to do some things on the command line and some with kdesvn.

Then you need to upgrade your subclipse plugin to subclipse 1.4

If you can - then upgrade to Eclipse 3.4 

Having just upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 my key observation is that it's important to read the release notes first.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810

There are a few bugs which have affected me

I just discovered a nifty little utility

Often working copies are only partially updated, this command gives a very quick command-line summary of the state of the working copy.

It's not as rich an output as kdesvn which will colour code all the updateable files, but its a standard part of svn so should always be available.

Name

svnversion — Summarize the local revision(s) of a working copy.

I’ve
been using open source software and developing php for a decade or so
now - but until recently the two have been fairly seperate.