Comment 18 for bug 162517

The startup scripts are fine. /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.2 exists, and it duefully will start all 8.2 instances that you created with pg_createcluster. The script you mention is from upstream; you can use and customize it if you don't want to use the Debian/Ubuntu packaging, but if you do that then you cannot complain about the Ubuntu scripts not dealing with your custom setup.

The root cause is that when you installed postgresql-8.2 the first time, the default locale did not exist and thus the package maintainer script could not create the initial default instance for 8.2 (called 'main', configuration in /etc/postgresql/8.2/main/).

So you have two options:

 * Ignore the Ubuntu packacking and continue using your custom configuration (but then you loose all the tools like pg_upgradecluster for automatic upgrading).

 * Dump your custom database, and revert to the distribution scripts, to retain distro support and tools. To do that I would recommend the following steps:

   - pg_dumpall your current db
   - Purge postgresql-8.2 (removal is NOT sufficient): sudo apt-get remove --purge postgresql-8.2
   - Remove all scripts you installed manually, like /etc/init.d/postgresql, the data directory, etc.
   - sudo apt-get install postgresql-8.2
   - sudo -u postgres -i # to get a shell as the PostgreSQL superuser
   - feed back your dump: psql template1 -f dump.sql