Comment 28 for bug 193696

The install was actually done with apt-get. But you're right, Mathias - the problem was a result of ubuntu-vm-builder....

I ran it again and noticed what the real problem was. By default ubuntu-vm-builder doesn't set up a locale other than "C". When I log in via ssh, LANG=en_US.UTF-8 is picked up from my environment. postgresql doesn't like that outage:

Setting up postgresql-8.3 (8.3.1-1) ...
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
 LANGUAGE = (unset),
 LC_ALL = (unset),
 LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
Error: The locale requested by the environment is invalid.
Error: could not create default cluster. Please create it manually with

  pg_createcluster 8.3 main --start

I'll have to get in the habit of saving the output of big installs like this so I can dig out those error messages. (Or maybe apt-get could do that by default?)
And I'll think about how ubuntu-vm-builder can be improved so this doesn't happen....