How to check out a remote git branch

Before you can start working locally on a remote branch, you need to fetch it as called out in answers below.

To fetch a branch, you simply need to:

git fetch origin

This will fetch all of the remote branches for you. You can see the branches available for checkout with:

git branch -v -a

With the remote branches in hand, you now need to check out the branch you are interested in, giving you a local working copy:

git checkout -b test origin/test