aah, openacs.org is up again ;)
good point, gabriel. see, what i was trying to do, was to transfer my live oacs installation (on a hosted linux box 'out there') onto my local machine for testing and playing. so i simply dumped the db and made a tgz of my web directory, copied it onto my machine and got the aforementioned result.
i've meanwhile resorted to a clean install of oacs (indluding the data-model init) and simply copied the modified .adp and .tcl files into the new location.
so now i have a fresh and working version of my homepage at home to play around with, alas! without the content. oh well ;)