http://linuxbios.org/index.php/Download_LinuxBIOS says that if you are behind a firewall that blocks the svn port, you can work around this by using https for checkout.
However, in practice this doesn't really work, because at some point it will run into the "fetching external item" hack for the util/ directory, and hang there.
I would suggest removing the external item hack, and referring to the real util/ URL instead.