I've got supervisord 3.0a8 installed from the system package on ubuntu 10.04 (64bit). The supervisor service appears to be running, but it's not launching the configured programs. Interestingly enough, this exact configuration is running on another system, and is working as expected.

The main config file looks like this:

; /etc/supervisor/supervisord.conf
[unix_http_server]
chmod=0700
file=/var/run/supervisor.sock

[supervisord]
logfile=/var/log/supervisor/supervisord.log
childlogdir=/var/log/supervisor
pidfile=/var/run/supervisord.pid

[rpcinterface:supervisor]
supervisor.rpcinterface_factory = supervisor.rpcinterface:make_main_rpcinterface

[supervisorctl]
serverurl=unix:///var/run/supervisor.sock

[include]
files = /etc/supervisor/conf.d/*.conf

A sample program config looks like this:

; /etc/supervisor/conf.d/sample.conf 
[program:sample]
directory=/opt/sample
command=/opt/sample/run.sh

Where, the /opt/sample/run.sh is:

#!/bin/bash

while true; do
    T=`date`
    echo "[$T] Running!" >> /var/log/sample.log
    sleep 1
done

And, here's some additional information regarding the running instance of supervisord:

root@myhost:~# supervisorctl version
3.0a8

root@myhost:~# which supervisorctl
/usr/bin/supervisorctl
root@myhost:~# which supervisord
/usr/bin/supervisord

root@myhost:~# supervisorctl status  # NOTE that there's no output!
root@myhost:~# supervisorctl avail
root@myhost:~# service supervisor status
 is running

root@myhost:~# ps aux | grep supervisor
root     21740  0.1  0.4  40772 10056 ?        Ss   11:28   0:00 /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/supervisord
root     21749  0.0  0.0   7624   932 pts/2    S+   11:28   0:00 grep --color=auto supervisor

root@myhost:~# cat /var/log/supervisor/supervisord.log 
2012-04-26 11:28:22,483 CRIT Supervisor running as root (no user in config file)
2012-04-26 11:28:22,536 INFO RPC interface 'supervisor' initialized
2012-04-26 11:28:22,536 WARN cElementTree not installed, using slower XML parser for XML-RPC
2012-04-26 11:28:22,536 CRIT Server 'unix_http_server' running without any HTTP authentication checking
2012-04-26 11:28:22,539 INFO daemonizing the supervisord process
2012-04-26 11:28:22,539 INFO supervisord started with pid 21740

root@myhost:~# ll /etc/supervisor/conf.d/
total 28
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2012-04-26 11:31 ./
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2012-04-25 18:38 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   66 2012-04-26 11:31 sample.conf

root@myhost:~# ll /opt/sample/
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2012-04-26 11:32 ./
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2012-04-26 11:31 ../
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   97 2012-04-26 11:32 run.sh*

root@myhost:~# python
Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Apr 16 2010, 13:57:41) 
[GCC 4.4.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 

Any help is greatly appreciated!