I am using ubuntu 12.04 with the archive manager, i clicked and dragged all the files from the extracted 3.3.7 zip into the minecraft jar.
It seems that applying it through MC patcher seems to work
Minecraft crashes right where the mojang screen would be when loading. There are no other mods, there is no log, the jar is vanilla, and the META-INF is gone. The only non-vanilla minecraft element is forge.