Well, it's not really a "problem" per se.
The RPMs were created to fill the demand for the "Click the Continue button to continue" crowd who wanted a simple, shrink-wrapped installation of OpenACS. This is great that the OpenACS developers have acknowledged the importance of making the product more accessible to newcomers, but when you roll up your sleeves to get to real work, compiling and installing OpenACS ends up being the really trivial part. The RPM-based install is a gentle way for non-Linux and/or non-web/db folks to dive into the system. It doesn't excuse you from eventually learning about all of this stuff.
Expanding on the OpenACS's core services by customizing the toolkit is what this whole web/db thing is about. You *will* need to learn how to script Tcl, write decent SQL queries, etc., etc. in addition to tuning your Linux kernel, the database, choosing appropriate support services (e.g., replacing sendmail with qmail), etc. etc.
In any case, the AOLserver source code tarball is about 3.6MB, downloadable even on a pokey modem connection (I should know since I'm on one). I have a habit of compiling my security and web software from scratch. RPMs are very convenient for end-users, but don't provide all of the options that compiling from the source offers.
You're going to have to learn how to do this eventually, and learning how to compile and install AOLserver is a pretty gentle introduction to this new realm for you.
