Re: Getting started

Donn Washburn <n5xwb@comcast.net> writes:
> I am new with Postgres.  I am running openSuSE 11.3 Milestone 4 and
> their version of Postgresql-8.4

> rpm -qa | grep postg
> postgresql-libs-8.4.2-4.1.i586
> postgresql-8.4.2-4.1.i586
> postgresql-server-8.4.2-4.1.i586
> postgresql-contrib-8.4.2-4.1.i586

> /etc/init.d/postresql start <-fails

Fails how, exactly?  (I assume you typed the script name correctly,
not as quoted above.)

I'm not familiar with openSUSE's packaging, but in a lot of PG start
scripts you'd need to do "/etc/init.d/postgresql initdb" before you
could issue "start" the first time.  I'd have expected the script to
tell you so pretty clearly if that were needed, though.

Another possibility is that you are trying to run the start script
without being root, but hopefully that would give a clear permissions
error.

Really we can't do much more than guess without seeing the exact
failure message.

            regards, tom lane