SOLVED - the virtual drive must have been corrupted, it worked on another, thanks for all the suggestions.
Here I was thinking I could install NS3.3 in a virtualbox on my favorite vaio... worked out ok but don't have that nice SVGA/VESA driver. So I try applying Patch3 from NeXT/Apple ... and it stops at about 3/4 of the way through, a directory problem.
Now I don't give up easily on unix stuff, but neither openbsd nor linux seem to be able to uncompress the tar.Z (yes I used uncompress before tar) in the .pkg file. So either Apple's patch is corrupt or none of my systems can uncompress this properly. This doesn't bode well for NeXT stuff :?
Wasn't the VESA patch only for OpenStep? I'm not sure about this since I use OpenStep for quite a long time by now and don't have my disks ready to check.
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Now I don't give up easily on unix stuff, but neither openbsd nor linux seem to be able to uncompress the tar.Z (yes I used uncompress before tar) in the .pkg file
This is because NeXTStep and OpenSep installer use a special tar version ("installer_bigtar" inside Installer.app) able to handle long filenames. Unfortunately the archives created with this version are not compatible to gnutar so they have to be unpacked on NS/OS using the installer_bigtar.
Well I tried originally with the NeXT Archiver & Installer as well as trying the native tar. No go what so ever...
I'm 100% positive this patch worked over the last few years, really strange unless Apple had fs problems on their server that might explain a corrupt archive.
Try downloading the patch from our archive here and see if you have the same problem. Also try untarring the patch file directly with installer_bigtar if you haven't tried that already. Directions on how to do that can be found
here (
http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2186). I've only tried it on OPENSTEP, but the process should be similar for NEXTSTEP. Hope that helps.