Cannot change ascii/binary property

[guruyaya]

Hi
I have a CVS pserver running on ubuntu-linux (inside a chroot, all
installed using standart apt-get commands). On the client side, I'm
using eclipse CVS client, on windows XP.
I have some files that are set to binary mode. I can read the files
data from cvs, can commit, but changing them into ascii is just
impossible. I must say that chaing an ascii to another type of ascii
(kkv to ko for example), or to binary works great! Only changing
binary back to ascii is impossible.
This is what the servers says:
Problems encountered while setting file transfer mode
project-name: cvs commit: failed to create lock directory for `/cvs/
root/CVSROOT'(/cvs/root/ CVSROOT/#cvs.history.lock): Permission denied
project-name: cvs commit: failed to obtain history lock in repository
`/cvs/root'
The file /cvs/root/CVSROOT/#cvs.history .lock does not exists, and
creating one using touch does not help much.
on the logs (set to debug mode) I see this:
cvsd: connection from 10.0.0.200 3976
cvsd: debug: fork() succeeded (child pid=12629)
cvsd: debug: select() failed (ignored): Interrupted system call
cvsd: cvs command exited with exit-status 0
which is quite the same as it shows in any commit I send.
Thanks in advance
Yair