I'm working with a friend on a 3D animation, and inspired by the Orange project, decided to use Subversion for version control, and, hey, I'm paying for my linode...

SO! I've been trying to get subversion to work... but my Linode luck has struck again.

What I need is a Subversion repository named MOVIE which can be accessed by my friend with TortiseSVN (Windows user/graphic type person). I thought TRAC would also be good because it would let us collaborate and share notes online, especially if we let some others in on the project.

Could someone explain how to do this with Ubuntu on Linode? I've made a big botch of things (read: tried some online tutorials and got a not working subversion with a not working trac).

First of all the subversion book is an excellent resource. Read it.

In particular I would do an "svnadmin create /local/path/to/repository", and then edit the /local/path/to/repository/conf/svnserve.conf file something like this:

[general]
anon-access = none
auth-access = write
password-db = passwd
realm = Movie Repository

Then create a file /local/path/to/repository/conf/ that looks something like:

[users]
user1=password1
user2=password2

Finally make sure the subversion server is actually running. Mine is started by the inetd daemon with the following line in /etc/inetd.conf:

svn   stream   tcp   nowait   nobody   /usr/bin/svnserve svnserve -i -r /var/lib/svn

Then in TortoiseSVN checkout the repository:

svn://yourlinode.com/repository/

There are a variety of other ways to set it up. Probably the most popular way is to use SSH & system accounts instead of the plain svn protocol and the passwd file.

I have it under Apache (and under Apache and Windows in other machine, too). It works well and can integrate with htpasswd users. There is a comparison here which may help to decide which one to choose.