To exclude certain files and directories from subversion’s version control you can set the ‘svn:ignore’ property as described in Ignoring Unversioned Items.
That works fine but nevertheless you might run into problems if you are using
svn add *
or similiar on linux systems. This is due to the shell expansion of wildcards. The above command is expanded to explicit files names svn add filename and seems to have the same effect as svn add --no-ignore filename.
Tip: Use svn add --force . instead!