First of all, thanks for the swift replies.
The whole error message is actually this :
psql -h localhost -U markulis
psql: could not connect to server: Network is unreachable
Is the server running on host "localhost" and accepting
TCP/IP connections on port 5432?
the result of :
ps -aef | grep postmaster
is
postgres 8702 1 0 19:08 pts/1
00:00:00 /usr/lib/postgresql/8.0/bin/postmaster
-D /var/lib/postgresql/8.0/main -c
unix_socket_directory=/var/run/postgresql -c
config_file=/etc/postgresql/8.0/main/postgresql.conf -c
hba_file=/etc/postgresql/8.0/main/pg_hba.conf -c
ident_file=/etc/postgresql/8.0/main/pg_ident.conf
root 8811 8560 0 19:17 pts/1 00:00:00 grep postmaster
what I realized from this is that postmaster uses diferrent .conf files
than what I thought. Yet, I changed them too and nothing happened.
(The postgresql.conf on this directory had
listen_addresses = 'localhost'
commented out, but the default is localhost anyway)
the result of :
netstat -na | grep ':5432'
is nothing
I suppose that this suggests postmaster is not listening to port 5432.
But both postgresql.conf that I have on my system have the line
port = 5432