Permission problem with equivs-build

I am trying to install a vanilla texlive 2018 distribution on a ubuntu 16.04 machine following this guide: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1092/how-to-install-vanilla-texlive-on-debian-or-ubuntu/95373#95373 However in the step equivs-build texlive-local (executed as root) I get the error message: /usr/bin/fakeroot: line 175: debian/rules: Permission denied Error in the build process: exit status 126 How can I fix this?