Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: OpenACS 4.6.3/5.0.0b4 on Debian - Permissions Problem

Definitely sounds like you have some sort of unix file permission snafu.

Hm, I never put up any PostgreSQL stuff on my personal website to go with my Oracle doc, so FYI, just in case it turns out to be relevent, here are my Postgres-related notes from c. 2003/02/09. This was with Debian 3.0 and its postgresql 7.2.1-2woody4 package. I successfully did some OpenACS development and testing using OpenACS 4.6.x and some versions of the CVS Head with this:

Differences for Debian:

The Debian PostgreSQL packages seem to work very nicely, but some of their default settings are differnt from the upstream source defaults used in the OpenACS install docs.

On Debian 3.0, you will definitely need all of these packages (I believe the intarray stuff in postgresql-contrib is needed by the OpenFTS search engine used by OpenACS.):

postgresql postgresql-client postgresql-contrib
and you may want or need these as well:
postgresql-doc postgresql-dev

The Debian packages come with a nice /etc/init.d/postgresql script, so you don't have to do anything special, just use it.

Note that the Debian packages do an initdb for you, locating it in $PGDATA which is /var/lib/postgres/data by default. If you wat to put it somewhere else you can either change PGDATA and do:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql stop
$ sudo su - postgres "initdb"
$ sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql start

Or manually specify the location with, e.g.:

$ sudo su - postgres "initdb -D /tmp/pg-test"

The Debian package already installs plpgsql for you, so you do not need to do:

$ sudo su - postgres "createlang plpgsql template1"
To verify, do:
$ sudo su - postgres "createlang -l template1"

By default, errors go to: /var/log/postgres.log

Startup scripts:

Just like for Oracle, on my own development machine (rather than a server), I prefer that PostgreSQL not startup automatically. I'll use the same S94 and K06 I used for Oracle:

The Debian packages install the equivalent of, which is ok for a server:

$ sudo /usr/sbin/update-rc.d postgresql defaults 20 20

So for a Debian desktop where Postgres is only used for testing I do:

$ sudo rm /etc/rc?.d/???postgresql
$ sudo /usr/sbin/update-rc.d postgresql stop 06 0 1 6 .