Some short CVS examples for those who might find them useful:
1. I don't think it would be difficult to get CVS files from Windows with TortoiseCVS. Although I 've only tried it once and then switched to Linux (I prefer the command line for this kind of work).
2. In Linux, after having set the CVSROOT environment variable so you don't have to use the -d option each time, you just go into a directory and type:
cvs -q checkout contrib/dms
This will create the contrib/dms directory and all its subdirectories and files in your local system. You are then free to copy them wherever you wish. If you wanted to checkout the complete /contrib/ structure, you would just do
cvs -q checkout contrib
And once you 've done that, you can just go into the /contrib directory on your local machine and use
cvs -q update
to stay up to date.
An excellent CVS guide which helped me tremendously when starting out with CVS can be found at http://www.loria.fr/~molli/cvs/doc/cvs_toc.html.
Hope this helps!
Jon