On Debian system you will need following packages installed to use RServ. If you don't have compiler installed, you will need that too. libecpg3 libdbd-pgsql postgresql-client libpgperl libdbd-pg-perl postgresql-dev postgresql If you have postgresql-dev 7.3.4-[78] (and possibly others), you won't be able to compile rserv trigger in lib directory. This is due to missing /usr/include/postgresql/server headers (Debian BUG #215683). I copied mine from 7.3.3-1 version.