This guide assumes that you’ve managed to install and start the postgres server. I’m ignoring these because they are well documented in several places, probably including your distribution, however, what to do next isn’t.

First you need to connect to the Postgres database with psql as postgres, on gentoo* distributions you must be in the Postgres group to do this. In the event this doesn’t work you may have to su to the postgres unix user account somehow and run psql from there.

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psql postgres postgres

you now have connected to what is essentially the “root” user for postgres. as with all ‘super user’ accounts be careful and know what you are doing. also, as with all ‘super user’ accounts you don’t normally want to run as them, so we need to create another user. I recommend creating the user with the same name as whatever shell account you may be connecting to it from (if applicable) because then you don’t have to specify the username when typing psql. CREATE ROLE

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CREATE USER xenoterracide WITH PASSWORD 'YeahLikeIdTellYou';

next you need to give the user a database. like the user account if you make it the same name as the shell account you won’t have to pass it to psql. CREATE DATABASE

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CREATE DATABASE xenoterracide WITH OWNER xenoterracide;

now you’re done with the setting up your users account so quit psql by tying \q at the prompt. now you can simply log in from your users shell by typing psql and SQL-ing away.