[H-GEN] postgres & postgis setup

[mick]

After dumping ArchLinux in favour of Ubuntu 11.10 I'm having a devil of a time getting postgres 9.1 & postgis set up and working correctly. 

Following the instructions in the relevant manuals and the Ubuntu wiki I end up with ownership of various parts of the schema shared between superuser "postgres" and user "gis" created with the installations.

When I go to the next step, create a table to hold a class of objects (eg. highways, Rivers, ...), I keep running into permission problems.

The tutorial I bookmarked when using Arch now returns '404' errors.

What I need is clearer, complete instructions to:

set up postgis with all relevant extras and correct permissions
make a template of the above
create working databases owned by user from the template
fill the DBs using osm2pgsql

Is the SKS out there who can help me get this happening?

mick