Subscribing to SVN on Gna

The DoudouLinux source code can be accessed without creating an account on our hosting service Gna but this prevents you from sending modifications. If you want to be able to send modifications, you have to:

1. create an account on Gna
2. ask to become a member of the DoudouLinux project
3. generate and register your public authentication key in your freshly created Gna account
4. get a versioned copy of the DoudouLinux source code

Of course you also need an SVN client! The authentication key must be an RSA key. You can create such a key using GnuPG. Below you will find detailed instructions per operating system.

Instructions for Linux users

GnuPG is a standard Linux tool. Most likely it should be already installed but if this is not the case, simply search your package manager for a package named “gnupg” and ask the system to install it. The command to generate an RSA key is the following:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

This will create your key in the hidden directory ~/.ssh/. Before proceeding, GnuPG will ask you to enter a pass-phrase. Please note that it is not just a password, so we ask you to create a long phrase (spaces are permitted) in order to avoid fraudulent accesses to your account. An example: "How now brown cow?"

The public key is stored in the file ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. You have to copy its entire contents into your Gna account in the entry field “Public key nbr. 1”. Now you can get a local copy of the DoudouLinux source code [1]. For example, if you work on translations only, issue the following command:

svn checkout svn+ssh://USERNAME@svn.gna.org/svn/doudoulinux/lang doudoulinux-lang

Of course you are free to change the output directory doudoulinux-lang. Don’t forget to type your user id instead of USERNAME! SVN should ask you the pass-phrase for this operation. But if you don’t use a GPG agent, it will keep asking you for the phrase for every operation which may really become annoying. To avoid this, you can type the command ssh-add to store your pass-phrase for the current session.

Another alternative is to install a pinentry program or an askpass program [2] that will automatically ask you for it only once. Search your package manager to install one of them if it is not already done.

Instructions for Macintosh users

Not available yet

Instructions for Windows users

Not available yet