I installed the postgresql-8.4 package with default options. Everything worked fine, however I can't seem to manage to create unicode databases: -- This doesn't work createdb test1 --encoding UNICODE -- This works createdb test2 The error message, createdb: database creation failed: ERROR: new encoding (UTF8) is incompatible with the encoding of the template database (SQL_ASCII) is a bit puzzling because (afaik) I don't use a template for creating the new db, or is it implicitely referring to the default "postgres" database for some reason ? Or maybe I'm missing a setting in a .conf file ?