Postgres on Ubuntu 10.04 (i586)

Installed Ubuntu 10.04 (i586) on my laptop, then used ubuntu software center to install postgres and pgAdmin III, as well as apache2. Neither of them start at boot time - I have to manually start each of them (even after trying to edit /etc/rc.local to force the startup). In the postgres case, I suspect that at least part of the problem is that /var/run is not writable by the postgres user/group so that postgres cannot start the socket. However, my biggest problem is that i cannot find the errors from either of these startup sequences.
Does rc.local not exist to ubuntu's startup sequence?

Thanks in advance.
b.