Subversion is built on a portability layer called APR (the Apache Portable Runtime library). This means Subversion should work on any operating system that the Apache httpd server runs on: Windows, Linux, all flavors of BSD, Mac OS X, Netware, and others.
The easiest way to get Subversion is to download a binary
package built for your operating system. Subversion's website
(http://subversion.tigris.org
) often has
these packages available for download, posted by volunteers.
The site usually contains graphical installer packages for users
of Microsoft operating systems. If you run a Unix-like
operating system, you can use your system's native package
distribution system (RPMs, DEBs, the ports tree, etc.) to get
Subversion.
Alternately, you can build Subversion directly from source
code. From the Subversion website, download the latest
source-code release. After unpacking it, follow the
instructions in the INSTALL
file to build
it. Note that a released source package contains everything you
need to build a command-line client capable of talking to a
remote repository (in particular, the apr, apr-util, and neon
libraries). But optional portions of Subversion have many other
dependencies, such as Berkeley DB and possibly Apache httpd. If
you want to do a complete build, make sure you have all of the
packages documented in the INSTALL
file.
If you plan to work on Subversion itself, you can use your
client program to grab the latest, bleeding-edge source code.
This is documented in the section called “Get the Source Code”.