$ svn update
svn: This client is too old to work with working copy '.'; please get a newer Subversion client

So this is what my development setup looks like, I run a vm of JeOS and mount it on my mac using macfusion. So I have access to my code on both via ssh and via terminal. I got the above error as I accidentally did this update on the host machine side which had svn version 1.6.5 running where as on my vm I was still running 1.4.6. So searching for a couple of mins on the internet, I managed to update my version of svn on JeOS (which is actually another version ubuntu but for servers). I am documenting the steps below just in case anyone else might find it useful.

Open the sources.list and update it with the new source.

$ sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list

and add the following two lines at the bottom

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/anders-kaseorg/subversion-1.6/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/anders-kaseorg/subversion-1.6/ubuntu hardy main

hardy can be replaced by your version ubuntu, I am still on ubuntu as its just a development server with the latest version of apache, mysql and it works very well for me, so no reason to upgrade yet. Also JeOS is available on the not so latest version of ubuntu anyway.

Add the related key signature

$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 413576CB

413576CB is the signing key on the home page of the project https://launchpad.net/~anders-kaseorg/+archive/subversion-1.6.

Signing key:
1024R/413576CB
Fingerprint:
026491A5DD081BDC6CDFC0DE6298AD34413576CB

Now all you need to do is update your aptitude cache and upgrade the version of svn.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get --reinstall install subversion

JeOS on VirtualBox has been my preferred distro/app for running vm for basic development for a while now, thanks for Brad’s post and it has worked quite well for me so far.

One of the problems that I faced when setting up development environments for the team was when we prepared an image and copied over to a server to run it for other users to use, it would loose all its networking settings. The solution for its fix was as follows:

#ifconfig -a

This will show you all the interfaces, even the ones that dont show up when you run ifconfig by itself. If you can see the eth0.. etc in there then edit the file at /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

#sudo vi /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

remove all the entries in it that were returned by the ifconfig -a command, save and reboot. When the networking service gets started again (actually you could just restart the service ‘networking’ rather than rebooting the vm) the interfaces would get configured correctly.