Contents
Setup a user
As root type useradd postgress to add the user and passwd postgres to set the password. Or, if you are familiar with linuxconf, you can use that instead.Edit /home/postgres/.bash_profile and add the line:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/pgsql
The RPMs
The source code is available for Postgres, but for now we're going to use the pre-compiled RPMs. These are available from http://www.postgresql.org/ and at the time of writing, version 7.0.2-2 is the current release.As always, these instructions apply to this specific version, although they may work for other versions.
I downloaded these files:
postgres-7.0.2-2.i386.rpm *
postgres-devel-7.0.2-2.i386.rpm *
postgres-jdbc-7.0.2-2.i386.rpm
postgres-odbc-7.0.2-2.i386.rpm
postgres-perl-7.0.2-2.i386.rpm
postgres-python-7.0.2-2.i386.rpm
postgres-server-7.0.2-2.i386.rpm *
postgres-tcl-7.0.2-2.i386.rpm *
postgres-test-7.0.2-2.i386.rpm
postgres-tk-7.0.2-2.i386.rpm
Put the RPMs where ever you like. I keep them in /home/postgres/RPMS, but you don't have to keep them once you've used them.
You can install them all if want, but for now we're only interested in the ones marked *. To install, you need to be root in the same directory as the RPMs. Type:
Postgres is now installed.rpm -i postgres-7.0.2-2.i386.rpm rpm -i postgres-server-7.0.2-2.i386.rpm rpm -i postgres-tcl-7.0.2-2.i386.rpm rpm -i postgres-devel-7.0.2-2.i386.rpm
Create system files
Login as postgres. Decide where you want to store the data files for your databases. I use /home/postgres/data...mkdir /home/postgres/data initdb -D /home/postgres/data
Hopefully you'll see a "Success" message telling you how to start the database.
Auto start
You may want Postgres to start at boot up. The startup script should have been installed from the RPM, and is in /etc/rc.d/init.d. As root, simply create a link to the startup script in /etc/rc.d/rc2.d:ln -s ../init.d/postgresql S98postgres
Do the same in /etc/rc.d/rc3.d, /etc/rc.d/rc4.d and /etc/rc.d/rc5.d.
Michael Hinds, August 2000