To integrate SVN with Eclipse I chose Subclipse - follow their installation instructions
I found that Subclipse was pretty slow compared to the CVS integration that I had previously been using. I looked into it and found that there are two backends available pure-java (JavaSVN) and native (JavaHL). You can tell which you are using by going to Window -> Preferences -> Team -> SVN.
If you are using JavaSVN you may want to consider moving over. I am much more comfortable with the performance of JavaHL.
Unfortunately not all Linux distros ship the subversion-javahl package by default and you are further constrained in that you need one of version >=1.3. This does not seem to have hit my distros yum repos yet (FC4), so I had to build mine (and a dependency trail ...) from a SRPM.
Building involved also installing apr-1.2.2-7.2, apr-util-1.2.2-4.2, java-1.4.2-gcj-compat-devel-1.4.2.0-40jpp_31rh.FC4.2 and a few others, also symlinking apr-1-config and apu-1-config to apr-config and apu-config respectively in /usr/bin as they did not seem to end up where the subversion build expected them to be.
Finally I symlinked the resulting libs (from subversion-javahl) into $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/i386 and restarted my Eclipse - bingo !
All in all, a ridiculous amount of effort, but will save an enormous amount of frustration in the long run - and you don't have to break the ice 
.