Tracking multiple branches in svn repo with git-svn

For some time now, have wanted to use git and git-svn to track the subversion repo at work. That repo has lots of branches, and individual changesets are merged very often between branches, making it a nightmare to find out what has already been merged, and what not.
Used to keep track of all this in a text file. Its becoming tedious. Have been trying to use git-svn to ease the pain.
On the first try, git-svn gave up halfway during the clone operation with an error message about protocol/network error. This git-svn was the one in ubuntu repositories.
Since then, installed git from source.
First I tried this way. It works, but then gitk will only show me one branch: the one I have currently checked out.
Now, I am trying this other way. Hopefully this will work better.