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As many coders will tell you, there reaches a point where you realise that you absolutely, positively must keep your code in a a revision control system. In my working life, I’ve used Microsoft’s ageing SourceSafe and more recently the vastly superior SubVersion (SVN).

There’s many powerful GUIs out there which you can use to interact with SVN, and make the checking out and checking in very easy. If you primarily use a desktop GUI (like me), then chances are you use a SVN client GUI to interact with SVN on a day-to-day basis.

But what happens when you need to move code between repositories?

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The latest (10.3) version of OpenSuse was released a few days ago. As I use Suse as my main development environment at work, I eagerly downloaded it as soon as I could, and installed it on a virtual machine.

First impressions are very good - very quick startup time, easy 1-click installs and a bright and cheery colour scheme.

Unfortunately, I can’t switch for real as the Novell Client doesn’t work yet, and I need to client to access my shared drives at work. (Although I could use WebDAV, it doesn’t work so well). Attempting to install the Beta 2.0 version yields a single dependency error (wrong version of binutils). Satisfying the dependency results in the Novell Client loading - but not connecting at all. Seemingly, the public Beta 2.0 of the client is no longer available for download.

There was quite a wait on Suse 10.2 for a working Novell Client - which was released in beta form a couple of months ago (and it works very nicely too). I’ll eagerly await and hope that Novell release a new client soon, then I will more than happily switch to the new version.

UPDATE 29th Nov 2007

I”ve just spotted that Novell have posted a way to run the 10.2 client on 10.3, over at coolsolutions.

It has a simple step-by-step guide that just involves entering a few commands into the shell.

Having tried Windows Vista on my shiny new iMac and having a few issues (stuttering sound, slower loading times), I decided to revert back to using Windows XP.

Now, Bootcamp is supposed to make this easy - you just launch the Bootcamp assistant, and click “Restore the startup disk to a single volume”. A few moments later, all seemed well, and I was prompted to reboot.

After the reboot, the Windows XP drive is still visible, and it seems nothing has happened. After trying this multiple times and getting quickly fed up, I ruled out a few other ways to delete Windows:

• I couldn’t run the Windows XP installer disk - rebooting the iMac with the disk in the drive caused a “Press any key to boot from CD…” prompt. Unfortunately, the iMac keyboard doesn’t work at that point.
• Attempting to run the XP installer from within Vista - the “Install Windows XP” option is greyed out and not selectable
• OS X’s disk utility wouldn’t let me unmount or erase the Windows parition
• I was too scared to use fdisk from the command line, just in case I nuked my OS X partition (and didn’t want to reformat the whole lot for the same reason)

So, how did I fix it in the end?

If you can’t delete Windows from your Mac’s bootcamp installation:

• Drag the Windows parition to the Trash to unmount it
• Run the Bootcamp assistant and choose “Restore the startup disk to a single volume”

Guess that’s the risk you take when you use Beta software eh?