Instructions for the installation of postgres will depend on your operating system. It may be already installed or you may be able to install it via RPMs. These particular instructions work for Fedora machines in the Cambridge Computer Laboratory, but are described here in the hope that it will be easier to find equivalents in other systems than to start from the postgres documentation.

For Fedora Core, the necessary bundles are postgresql, postgresql-server and postgresql-libs. Once the RPMs are installed, you need a location for the database files, for instance:

$ export PGDATA=/local/scratch/~aac10/pg-data

Then initialize:

$ /usr/bin/initdb

If initialization is successful, the server can be started. e.g.,

$ /usr/bin/pg_ctl -D /local/scratch/aac10/pg-data -l logfile start

We can then go ahead and create a lexical db, as described in LkbLexDbSingleUser.

The database will run under your user id, so this procedure is unsuitable for the multi-user mode.

To stop the postgres server gracefully:

/usr/bin/pg_ctl -D /local/scratch/$USER/pg-data stop