I see many people are against the idea of having GUI to handle subversion. They see that those who do so are the really lazy bones trying to skip typing a few command lines. But I found that I ended up not using some version control most of the time (where I should have) just because I always forget those commands.
TortoiseSVN is handy in windows. For Ubuntu, I don’t see why a little bit integration of SVN with nautilus really hurts. Anyway, it isn’t hard to install.
Of course, a SVN repository needs to be setup first. A quick tutorial is given here.