Question about Source Control

[Frank Millman]

Hi all

I know I *should* be using a Source Control Management system, but at 
present I am not. I tried to set up Mercurial a couple of years ago, but I 
think I set it up wrongly, as I got myself confused and found it more of a 
hindrance than a help. Now I am ready to try again, but I want to avoid my 
earlier mistakes.

I understand the concept, and I understand the importance, so I do not need 
reminding of those. What I would like help with is the basic setup. I could 
subscribe to the Mercurial mailing list and ask there, but I am hoping for a 
kick-start here. Here is my setup.

All my source code resides on an old Linux server, which I switch on in the 
morning and switch off at night, but otherwise hardly ever look at. It uses 
'samba' to allow sharing with Windows, and 'nfs' to allow sharing with other 
Linux machines.

I need to test my program on Windows and on Linux, so I run it from both at 
various times. On Windows I have a 'mapped drive' pointing to the source 
code. On Linux I use a third machine, running a recent Fedora, using nfs to 
mount a directory pointing to the source code. Obviously each machine has 
its own version of Python installed.

I do my development on the Windows machine. I use TextPad, a simple text 
editor, which works fine for my purposes. It uses the mapped drive to point 
to the source code.

So where should I install the SCM, and how should I set it up so that I can 
access the latest version from any machine?

Any hints will be appreciated.

Frank Millman