Permission denied error for initdb

Hi all,

I'm trying to use PostgreSQL on a sever running Debian without root access.
I've installed it locally to ~/.local, however when I run initdb I get the
following:

fbbgsa(at)web1:~/.local$ initdb -D ~/.local/data
The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user "fbbgsa".
This user must also own the server process.

The database cluster will be initialized with locale "en_US.UTF-8".
The default database encoding has accordingly been set to "UTF8".
The default text search configuration will be set to "english".

Data page checksums are disabled.

fixing permissions on existing directory /home/.local/data ... ok
creating subdirectories ... ok
selecting default max_connections ... 10
selecting default shared_buffers ... 400kB
creating configuration files ... ok
creating template1 database in /home/.local/data/base/1 ... FATAL:
shmat(id=18808835) failed: Permission denied
child process exited with exit code 1
initdb: removing contents of data directory "/home/.local/data"

--

dt tells me that shared memory is mounted in /dev/shm, which is entirely
empty, and ipcs also displays nothing. I'm also unable to run strace to see
what initdb is doing. Is there perhaps a setting related to shared memory
that I can change, or another way to see more information about what's
going on with shmat?