Comment 9 for bug 18134

(In reply to comment #8)
> /var/run/postgresql:
> total 12
> drwxrwxr-x 2 postgres postgres 4096 2005-06-16 11:33 .
> drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4096 2005-06-16 11:47 ..
> srwxrwxrwx 1 postgres postgres 0 2005-06-16 13:38 .s.PGSQL.5432

Hm, everything looks alright. So the socket is in /var/run/postgresql/ (where it
belongs to), but sudo -u postgres psql -l tries to connect to the socket in
/tmp. This might have been a bug in very old packages, so can you please make
sure you use the latest versions?

What is the version of libpq3, postgresql-client-7.4 and postgresql-common? You
can find it out with

  dpkg -s <package name> | grep ^Version: