Dear christopher,
in case we don't get CVS working on your side, i've added an additional as additional source for OpenACS the tar release. To get the OpenACS 5.8.1 release via tar file, get the newest version of install-oacs.sh from git and uncomment the following line:
oacs_tar_release=
When you rerun the script, the core of OpenACS will be installed via wget + tar file. By using this way, one has to install the application packages via "install from repository".