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The user friendliness of TortoiseSVN is probably the best feature that Windows ever had, that linux didn’t. Having searched through a wide number of sites and blogs trying to find a good alternative for Tortoise SVN, I was able to shortlist the following tools

• KDESVN + Nautilus Scripts
• SmartSVN
• RapidSVN
• Eclipse SVN Plugins like Subclipse & Subversive (If you are a eclipse based developer)

My Personal best choices are,

1. Subclipse for Eclipse
2. KDESVN + Nautilus Scripts for Standalone clients

KDESVN + Nautilus Script as Standalone SVN clients

KDESVN is a Visual SVN Client tool that can be installed in Ubuntu. Try this command to install it

>> sudo apt-get install subversion kdesvn kompare

KDESVN gives users the ability to connect to a subversion repository and perform operations. But the coolest thing about Tortoise SVN is that its accessibility, it is available everywhere on the right click menu. So in order to replicate the ease of use, we will need to replicate the right click functionality in local file browser (which is nautilus). This can be done using a few nautilus scripts

KDESVN connected to nautilus script

After Installation, you will have to configure the rightclick menu scripts here

>> ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts

create a file called “kdesvn.sh” with the following contents

>> #!/bin/sh
>> kdesvn $1


assign execute rights to that file

>> chmod +x kdesvn.sh


Now open the file browser, you will be able to see KDESVN in the scripts context menu. To activate the SVN client, select some folder in local repository, and try the menu. It will popup the KDESVN interface.