access denied with moved repository

[eholiday]

I moved my cvsroot from an old drive on an old machine to a new drive
on a new machine and from Fedora to Ubuntu.

On the new machine I created a cvs user and group and put my user in
the cvs group.

I chowned -R --from 502.502 cvs.cvs cvsroot
where 502 is the uid.guid of the fedora cvs.

And produced what appear to be identical permissions in the old and the
new.

Now when I ssh from my laptop to the new machine, I can checkout to the
new machine. But when I try to checkout on the new machine itself I get
cvsroot/CVSROOT : Permission denied.

I cannot directly checkout from my laptop to the new machine, but that
makes sense to me. I haven't addressed the remote issues yet, but it is
very very puzzling that my ssh session can checkout to my new machine
but a  console local to the new machine can't.

Any light?