Mercurial: No username supplied

The first error you might face while using Mercurial might be this:

$ hg commit
abort: no username supplied (see "hg help config")

Mercurial needs a username and email for almost all its operations. It looks for this in a Mercurial configuration file.

For Windows: The Mercurial configuration file is named Mercurial.ini. You will find a copy of this file in the Mercurial installation directory. Copy it to your %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH% directory (C:\Users\Joe\ on Windows 7).

For Linux: The Mercurial configuration file is named .hgrc. Create a file with this name in the home directory of the user if not already there.

Add these two lines to the Mercurial configuration file:

[ui]
username = Average Joe <average.joe@gmail.com>

Mercurial commands should work fine after this.

Tried with: Windows 7 Enterprise, Ubuntu 12.04 and Mercurial 2.0.2