subversion in 2 minutes on Debian Linux

On a Debian (SID) system, it should be as simple as this:

# apt-get install subversion

This will install all necessary binaries and tweak /etc/services so svnserve is executed by the user starting the ssh tunnel upon network activity.
configuring

Create a repository to store versioning data:

$ svnadmin create ~/svn

Import a source tree into subversion:

$ svn import /home/rnc/coEdit svn+ssh://127.0.0.1/home/rnc/svn/coEdit

With this import command, all files under /home/rnc/coEdit will be checked in as the toplever dir coEdit on your repository.

Now you need to checkout a working copy of your project source code:

$ cd ~/myWorkDir/
$ svn co svn+ssh://127.0.0.1/home/rnc/svn/coEdit

Now you are ready for commiting and updating source under ~/myWorkDir/coEdit. From here on, refer to /usr/share/doc/subversion/book/book.html for detailed usage info.