[plug] DebNewbie Q?

[sol]

Afternoon PLUGers,

Following on some advice from one of the list gurus some time back I 
decided to teach myself PostgreSQL. So I got the book "PostgreSQL: 
Introduction and Concepts" by Bruce Momjian and installed Postgres and 
excitedly began my first lesson. However, I got stymied straight up when 
I tried to launch psql from the console by being told that I needed to 
set user ID to "sol" for pg_shadow. I'd no idea how to do this, but 
after a hunt through the man pages found suidregister (I thought that 
this was the tool for the job) and did this:

suidregister /var/lib/postgres/data/pg_shadow sol postgres 600

I must have done something because the error message changed. When 
trying to launch psql I got:
Connection to database 'template1' failed.
Error: mdopen: couldn't open /var/lib/posd

I don't even know what posd (the daemon is postgresqld isn't it?) has to 
do with all this and I can't get started on my first template.
Bugger.....

As always, any advice sincerely appreciated,

Sol