=== THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS!! DO NOT FOLLOW THIS YET === === Steps for creating a "proper" Postgis 2.0 pacakge for Postgreql 9.1 on Debian Squeeze === I prefer to build in a chroot. Install debootstrap if you don't already have it. Change amd64 to i386 or whatever is necessary to suit your environment. {{{ mkdir chroot sudo debootstrap --arch=amd64 squeeze chroot http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ }}} Prevent start-stop-daemon from starting daemons inside the chroot. {{{ sudo bash -c "echo exit 0 > chroot/sbin/start-stop-daemon" }}} Bind mount the necessary directories from the host and chroot. {{{ sudo mount --bind /proc chroot/proc sudo mount --bind /sys chroot/sys sudo mount --bind /dev chroot/dev sudo mount --bind /dev/pts chroot/dev/pts sudo cp /etc/mtab chroot/etc/ sudo chroot chroot /bin/bash }}} Since you are already root inside the chroot there's no need to use sudo going forward. Configure locales in the chroot as things will break if this isn't done. {{{ apt-get update echo -e "en_US ISO-8859-1\nen_US.UTF-8 UTF-8" >> /etc/locale.gen apt-get install locales }}} Add the official Debian backports repo and pin the postgresql 9.1 dependency packages. Also add debhelper, as version 9 is required for building GEOS, which is also available from backports. {{{ cat >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.list <> /etc/apt/preferences.d/postgresql.pref <