Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> skribis:

> The problem turned out to be that on rekado's system, / was owned by
> user "rekado" with mode 700.

Oh, I see.  I would never have thought of this!

> Perhaps 'guix system init' should explicitly set the ownership and
> permissions on the target root directory?

Here’s a tentative patch.

I wonder if the activation code shouldn’t systematically do
(chown "/" 0 0) as well.

Thoughts?

Thank you both for investigating!

Ludo’.