I believe that particular error is caused by not running the postmaster with the '-i' option. It's come up before, and I know it's a configuration issue. Just not remembering exactly what configuration is needed to get past that.
But: Have you first initialized a database location with initlocation and installed the template1 database with initdb? Also look at the configuration files in /etc/postgresql. Especially look at pg_hba.conf and pg_ident.conf. -- Eric G. Miller Powered by the POTATO (http://www.debian.org)!