The subversion support on Radrails was flawned and I have been loosing a few days before finding out that the subclipse needed to be updated. Now, history is repeating and I am fighting some configuration monsters to get the good looking netbeans subversion support to work!

First issue: The SVN executables are not set by default!

Open the options / Miscellaneous / Subversion and set the /usr/local/bin/ folder as in the following screenshot.



Important, you have to input the svn executable folder, not the executable file. Unfortunately, there is no validation run by netbeans to check if your entry is valid!

A sidenote to Netbeans developpers, this is typically the kind of things which should be automatic, like in RadRails and Eclipse ;-)

Second issue: The subversion version installed on Ubuntu Edgy won't work with netbeans!

Ubuntu Edgy comes with version subversion 1.3, we'll need to upgrade to 1.4.2 manually because the synaptic repository does not contain anything ...
Here is a script inspired by Higepon which should make the whole thing easier, go to a tmp folder, copy & paste into a sh file and don't forget to make it executable with chmod +x install_svn_1.4.2.sh

sudo apt-get -y remove libsvn0
sudo apt-get -y remove subversion
sudo apt-get -y install libneon25 libneon25-dev
sudo apt-get -y install libapr1.0-dev
sudo apt-get -y install libaprutil1.0-dev
sudo apt-get -y install libdb4.2-dev
sudo apt-get -y install libdb4.2
sudo apt-get -y install libsqlite3-0
sudo apt-get -y install libsqlite3-dev
sudo apt-get -y install libldap-dev
sudo apt-get -y install libpq-dev
sudo apt-get -y install libexpat1-dev
wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.2.tar.bz2
tar vxf subversion-1.4.2.tar.bz2
cd subversion-1.4.2
./configure --with-ssl
make
sudo make install

The official NetBeans Subversion Support F.A.Q. is also a good source of informations.