Postgresql – Install postgresql on fedora 16 for use with Rails3

The issue was to do with not having write access to the log file for the 'postgres' user.

IMO, the startup script should echo an error to the screen instead of telling you to check the log that it can't even write to.

As you see from screenshot it's issue related to initdb,exe, which creates/initializes new database cluster. As PostgreSQL documentation stays:

initdb must be run as the user that will own the server process, because the server needs to have access to the files and directories that initdb creates. Since the server cannot be run as root, you must not run initdb as root either. (It will in fact refuse to do so.)

According to installer's doc there should be install-postgresql.log logfile in your %TEMP%, so you can get more info (additional there is --debuglevel installer option, run with --help to see more description).

If you encounter any problems during installation, please check the logfile that is created in /tmp on Linux or Mac OS X or %TEMP% on Windows. The file will be called install-postgresql.log. The logfile may contain the superuser password you specified during the installation, which should be replaced before sharing the log with anyone.

Are you using default postgres superuser/service account ? I don't know if this helps, but you try to remove it before (clean) installation by (using cmd with admin rights):

net user postgres /del