CVS and terminal values

[Tom Allison <tallison@tacocat.net>]

I'm trying to set up CVS on my workstation and I keep getting a number 
of really annoying errors.

For starters, I can't seem to get $CVSROOT defined correctly for a 
simple term window.  I tried putting
CVSROOT=/var/lib/cvs
export CVSROOT
into ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bashrc, ~/.profile
None of those worked.  Right now I have to do it by hand :(


Once I do get $CVSROOT defined I still can do anything.
tallison@isengard:~$ cvs checkout foo
cvs checkout: Updating foo
cvs checkout: failed to create lock directory for `/var/lib/cvs/foo' 
(/var/lib/cvs/foo/#cvs.lock): Permission denied
cvs checkout: failed to obtain dir lock in repository `/var/lib/cvs/foo'
cvs [checkout aborted]: read lock failed - giving up


I have added myself to the group  src and logged in again to make sure 
that the group assignment is applied.  Essentially what I'm seeing is 
that I cannot add any directories to the base project directory of foo.

I would rather not rewrite everything in CVS as 777 permissions, but I 
don't see what's the problem.