Yeah, I have this error message. “svn: Can’t convert string from ‘UTF-8′ to native encoding” when I want to do “svn checkout”. Why is that? Because of locales.

Let fix it.

First… I will try to set LC_CTYPE.

export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

and

svn checkout ...

you may already checkout correctly, see here, http://blog.refactor.se/2007/08/13/svn-fix-cant-convert-string-from-utf-8-to-native-encoding/

what I have is:

svn: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale
svn: warning: environment variable LC_CTYPE is en_US.UTF-8
svn: warning: please check that your locale name is correct

ok, so not yet. Next what I’m doing is:

locale-gen en_US.UTF-8

which gave me:

Generating locales...
en_US.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.

and the last thing:

update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

The end.
Now “svn checkout …” and everything is fine.