diff --git a/doc/src/sgml/installation.sgml b/doc/src/sgml/installation.sgml
index 4487d0cfd1..460a2279b6 100644
--- a/doc/src/sgml/installation.sgml
+++ b/doc/src/sgml/installation.sgml
@@ -75,7 +75,7 @@ su - postgres
make programs or older GNU make versions will not work.
(GNU make is sometimes installed under
the name gmake.) To test for GNU
- make enter:
+ make and check its version, enter:
make --version
@@ -385,8 +385,8 @@ su - postgres
This script will run a number of tests to determine values for various
system dependent variables and detect any quirks of your
operating system, and finally will create several files in the
- build tree to record what it found. You can also run
- configure in a directory outside the source
+ build tree to record what it found. If it does not print any error messages, configuration was successful.
+ You can also run configure in a directory outside the source
tree, if you want to keep the build directory separate. This
procedure is also called a
VPATHVPATH
@@ -1610,6 +1610,17 @@ su - postgres
All of PostgreSQL successfully made. Ready to install.
+ If you see an error message like:
+
+ERROR: `flex' is missing on your system. It is needed to create the
+file `bootscanner.c'. You can either get flex from a GNU mirror site
+or download an official distribution of PostgreSQL, which contains
+pre-packaged flex output.
+
+ then packages which are required to build
+ PostgreSQL are missing.
+ See for a list of requirements.
+
diff --git a/doc/src/sgml/start.sgml b/doc/src/sgml/start.sgml
index 5b73557835..e29672a505 100644
--- a/doc/src/sgml/start.sgml
+++ b/doc/src/sgml/start.sgml
@@ -19,9 +19,8 @@
If you are not sure whether PostgreSQL
- is already available or whether you can use it for your
- experimentation then you can install it yourself. Doing so is not
- hard and it can be a good exercise.
+ is already available for your experimentation,
+ you can install it yourself, which is not hard.
PostgreSQL can be installed by any
unprivileged user; no superuser (root)
access is required.
@@ -83,7 +82,7 @@
- The user's client (frontend) application that wants to perform
+ The user's client (frontend), an application that wants to perform
database operations. Client applications can be very diverse
in nature: a client could be a text-oriented tool, a graphical
application, a web server that accesses the database to
@@ -153,7 +152,7 @@
$ createdb mydb
- If this produces no response then this step was successful and you can skip over the
+ If this exits without any error message then this step was successful and you can skip over the
remainder of this section.
@@ -240,12 +239,14 @@ createdb: database creation failed: ERROR: permission denied to create database
You can also create databases with other names.
PostgreSQL allows you to create any
- number of databases at a given site. Database names must have an
- alphabetic first character and are limited to 63 bytes in
- length. A convenient choice is to create a database with the same
- name as your current user name. Many tools assume that database
- name as the default, so it can save you some typing. To create
- that database, simply type:
+ number of databases at a given site. However, if you would like to create databases with
+ names that do not start with an alphabetic character, you will need to quote it like so: "1234".
+ Database names are limited to 63 bytes in length. Database names longer than 63 bytes will be
+ truncated. You can change this limit by modifying the NAMEDATALEN variable,
+ but that would require recompiling PostgreSQL.
+ A convenient choice is to create a database with the same name as your current user name.
+ Many tools assume that database name as the default, so it
+ can save you some typing. To create that database, simply type:
$ createdb
@@ -355,7 +356,7 @@ mydb=#
The last line printed out by psql is the
prompt, and it indicates that psql is listening
- to you and that you can type SQL queries into a
+ to you and that you can type commands and SQL queries into a
work space maintained by psql. Try out these
commands:
version