I use a nice dual CPU Sun JDS as my main development workstation at school. My mentor got it on a grant, and I get to mess around with it as I work on my thesis. This machine is so fast that it is sick and it looks pretty too. Gnome runs on it so smoothly that I actually doesn’t even bother me that much (I’m a hard core KDE user).
But, unfortunately the JDS itself sucks ass. That is my honest opinion. This is not to say that it is a bad distro – it just sucks compared to what I’m used to – and that is Debian, and Ubuntu. I like nice apt-based distributions, with large communities and tons of easily available precompiled packages available via good packet management system. JDS community is small, the choice of downloadable packages is even smaller, and the version of Yast I’m using does not give me an option to connect to an online repository.
Seriously, if you are buying machines from Sun have a choice between Solaris 10 and JDS go with Solaris, because the community support is far better. I spent over an hour trying to find an RPM of Subversion that would actually install on my system. Every time I found one, it had 5-6 unmet dependencies which of course were not included on my software CD bundle. When I hunted down rpm’s of those dependencies they had in turn more dependencies, and so on. I finally gave up and decided I’ll compile from source… But of course my gcc version was wrong, so that idea went out the window. I can tell you one thing – if apt-get was a woman, I would friken marry it (only if it was hot though). It is a gift from God and you will never know just how good it is until you are stuck without it.
Anyways, all I really needed was to check in some code into my new Subverision repository on another machine, and then check out some other code. If I actually needed to set up that machine as a svn server then I would probably put some extra effort into it, and find a way to get it working. But seeing how I only needed a client I decided to search for alternate solutions.
I need something that has no crazy dependencies, so I turned to Java wold. I was really impressed by SmartSVN. It is a really solid SVN client that completely outclasses eSvn and RapidSvn in usability and user friendliness. The UI is clear, and intuitive and very well designed. If you are looking for a nice, self contained client that will run on any platform, definitely check it out.
Of course the major downside is that it is a proprietary application. The Foundation version is free, but you need to pay for the more advanced features. The only Pro feature I find really useful is the repository browser (which does come in handy if you decide to move stuff around inside the repository – but how ofter do you really do that). Other than that, I think the Foundation has very adequate functionality – especially for the normal day-to-day use kind of stuff.
So, now I’m using SmartSVN on the JDS workstation, kdesvn on my laptop and TortoiseSVN on windows. I think I have all my bases covered.
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