I got the same error building on Solaris 8 O/S running on a SPARCStation 5 (32 bit) computer.
Compiled and installed ok --with-perl and without perl using gcc
I created the postgres user account prior to compiling
I tried export USER=postgres prior to compiling as well
The error message I always receive on initdb is:
Could not determine current user name. You are really hosed.
I tried to su postgres with same result
tried to login from the command line as postgres and run initdb with the same result.
Iuchi, did you find a solution?
Has anyone found a solution?