Thanks for the quick replies.
Between going back and forth between the various installation methods on the website, I guess I missed some instructions.
I am installing on Debian 4. Up to this point, I've used the Cognovis scripts to install pg, tcl, and aolserver (http://cognovis.de/developer/en/pg82, http://cognovis.de/developer/en/aolserver_install).
Per Torbin's provided link, I decided to proceed with the Cognovis instructions for setting up an aolserver user (http://cognovis.de/developer/en/openacs_setup):
export SERVICE0=service0
sudo useradd $SERVICE0
sudo mkdir /var/lib/aolserver/$SERVICE0/
sudo chown -R $SERVICE0.web /var/lib/aolserver/$SERVICE0
sudo usermod -g web $SERVICE0
sudo usermod -d /var/lib/aolserver/$SERVICE0 $SERVICE0
/usr/local/pgsql/bin/createuser -s $SERVICE0 -U postgres
/usr/local/pgsql/bin/createdb -E UNICODE -U $SERVICE0 $SERVICE0
sudo su - $SERVICE0
At this point I switched (foolishly?) to the instructions on https://openacs.org/xowiki/openacs-subsystem-install, since they had more detail on how to proceed.
cvs -d :pserver:mailto:anonymous@cvs.openacs.org:/cvsroot co -d install openacs-4/etc/install
I was expecting the install.tcl and other files to be placed in /home/$OPENACS_SERVICE_NAME/install, but instead they are in /var/lib/aolserver/$OPENACS_SERVICE_NAME directory, and the /home/$OPENACS_SERVICE_NAME directory doesn't exist.
This has me a bit worried that I missed something earlier, or that there is some incompatibility with the installation methods. Before I muck things up further, I thought I'd see if anyone could spot anything obviously wrong...
Rick