New User: PostgreSQL Setup - "The Program 'postgress' is needed by initdb but was not found in the same directory..."

Hello,

I'm new to PostgreSQL, but am trying to set up a server on my machine. The PostgreSQL server is to run inside of a LXC container - I'm not sure if this is contributing to my problem or not, but it's worth mentioning. The main OS (host) of my machine is Ubuntu 11.10 (mostly, some packages are updated to newer versions), and my guest OS (inside the container) is Debian. I compiled PostgreSQL from source, and installed it inside the container. However, I did have to use the "without zlib" and "without readline" options to compile. This is strange, as both libraries are installed (confirmed via aptitude).

I'm following the instructions that come with the source, and am stuck on this line:

/usr/local/pgsql/bin/initdb -D /usr/local/pgsql/data

When I run it, I get the following:

sh: cannot create /dev/null: Permission denied
fgets failure: Success
The program "postgres" is needed by initdb but was not found in the
same directory as "/usr/local/pgsql/bin/initdb".
Check your installation.

initdb and postgres both reside in /usr/local/pgsql/bin, which I've also added to my PATH. Any help would be appreciated. I was hoping PostgreSQL would be reasonably straightforward to install. So far I've tried the Ubuntu tutorials, as well as one or two others online. Now I'm installing from source and using a mailing list....so much for simplicity.

I realize using LXC containers may add a layer of complexity, but what is it that I'm missing here?