Was checking out our code on ubuntu(jaunty) this weekend and was unable to checkout the code from our svn server. The checkout command kept asking me for the client certificate file.

So googled around for a solution and found this(Bug #294648: svn over https with client certificates broken (regression in intrepid)), there were a bunch of work arounds given and this one suited the best (Ubuntu 8.10 subversion ssl library changed)

Looks like a certificate file format issue, i had created it using OpenSSL and just had to convert it to the format GNU TLS understood.