Tar archive hijinks. What happened here?

So I have a tarball backup of Debian a Debian Sid system...

When decompressed with the version of tar that ships with Slackware 13.37 - the version with which it was created - it works fine. All permission are correct.

But when decompressed with the version found on the SystemRescueCD 2012-06-11, it gets messed up badly. RW permissions get converted to RO in various specific places, particularly in /var; and as a result the login manager won't start, the man database can't be updated, and gods only know what else doesn't work.

What exactly did I screw up here?

(ACLs are not involved, or I wouldn't be using tar.)

 

What version of tar is on the Debian system vs what version of tar is on the SystemRescueCD?

What was the tar command (full parameters) you used to decompress on either?

From where did you download SystemRescueCD?

-- Tom