Tortoise SVN checkout not working in Windows 8

Question

Hey I just bought a new laptop, it has Windows 8, and the desktop I have is on 7. The previous laptop which died was also on 7. I downloaded the latest version Tortoise SVN (1.8.1) on both the the new laptop and 7 desktop, to checkout a repository and it works completely fine in 7, and will not even connect on the 8 machine. I can't find any known issues that seem to relate to this.

Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

I experienced same problem on windows 8 machines twice (using tortoise with putty). I needed to explicitly specify user and password argument on TortoisePlink.exe.

You can add the arguments on TortoiseSVN Settings->Network->SSH->SSH Client. The value would look like: "C:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN\bin\TortoisePlink.exe" -v -l username -pw password

The problem seems to be on authentication part. Tortoise client can't retrieve credentials from saved sessions on putty.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

I have found a solution, although it may not be the solution.

I've installed Cygwin on my Windows 8 machine, and during the installation process, I checked all tools related to ssh. You can check if you installed it correctly if you find ssh.exe in your Cygwin directory. For instance: C:\cygwin\bin\ssh.exe.

Now go right-click "TortoiseSVN" in explorer and pick "Settings". Select "Network" and at the bottom, you'll discover that you can change the SSH client. Use C:\cygwin\bin\ssh.exe.

Now the Cygwin ssh client will be used instead of TortoisePlink. I don't know why this client works and plink doesn't, but it saved my day.

Extra remark: I used to use Pageant so that I wouldn't have to type in my password on my own machine, but you can also follow these three steps to achieve the same result.