Nilesh D Kapadia

Getting Postgresql running on Ubuntu and OS X (Leopard)

Here are some good articles on how to get going with Postgresql on Ubuntu:

http://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostgreSQL

And Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard):

http://www.z1r0.com/2008/03/configuring_postgresql_82_in_o.html

Note that version numbers don’t matter, as I was able to apply these instructions to Postgres 8.3.

I also find the pgadmin3 tool to be very helpful with Postgres. In Ubuntu you can find it in the repositories, in Mac OS X, you can get a binary to install from here. On Mac OS X, I had to set the following kernel parameters (as root):

    # Set kernel parameters
    sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmax=167772160 
    sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmmin=1 
    sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmseg=8 
    sysctl -w kern.sysv.shmall=65536 

I have a slightly modified version of the PostgreSQL script from the aforementioned blog that includes setting the kernel parameters.