newbie needs help setting up pgsql on linux

Hi everybody,

I am running RedHat Linux 6.1 on a Pentium, and am trying to migrate existing
databases from Access-Win95 to PostgreSQL on Linux.

I have installed the RPMs retrieved from RedHat's ftp site, read the relevant
sections in the admin guide, the user's guide and some more, but I can't get
postmaster to start. It seems that in order to start I need to install a
database with a template (template1) which should be in some ... .../data
directory. However, those files are nowhere to be found. I created a ...
.../data directory, ran initlocation -D the-directory-where-the-data-will-reside
and postmaster claims not to find a file called ...
.../data/base/template1/pg_class. I looked around in various directories, and
found some candidates in /usr/lib/pgsql/* but without instructions on how to
make that into my template. Finally, when I 'touch' a file to be named
pg_class, postmaster complains that the file PG_VERSION does not exist.

Can anyone help me?

ari