Didn't dare to complain about this, but same is happening to me (on SuSE Linux 9.1!). It worked some time ago, but I can't remember when the cut between working and non-working was.
svn IS in installed and in my path as I regularly update the CB trunk from command line, BUT (idea/hint): my version is quite old, 1.0. Perhaps some command line parameters that are necessary for auto-versioning CB (splash, about, etc.) are simply not yet supported by my old version of svn.
Though openSuSE 10.3 should contain a sufficiently recent version of svn to establish auto-versioning. I will fetch the source and try to build a newer version of svn and see what happens.
Regards,
Oliver