Please note

This post is obsolete and uses rather dirty methods. I added a quickstart guide to the README file in the mapnik-german repository, which should be used. However, this post might still be valuable for troubleshooting.

First, try to make Mapnik run using this guide:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapnik#Installation

In case things don’t work, you might find clues there:
http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=253552
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapnik/PostGIS
http://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/manually-building-a-tile-server-12-04/

In any case, you want to use the latest available sofware, but you do not need to compile from source. There are PPAs.

Install necessary software

#### Mapnik Uninstall any python-mapnik or python-mapnik2 packages from your system (https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki).

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mapnik/v2.1.0
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install libmapnik mapnik-utils python-mapnik #[!sic]

osm2pgsql

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kakrueger/openstreetmap
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install osm2pgsql

postgis

    sudo apt-get install postgis postgresql postgresql-9.1-postgis

Set-up data base

    sudo -u postgres createdb -E UTF8 -O postgres osm
    sudo -u postgres createlang plpgsql osm
    sudo -u postgres psql osm < /usr/share/postgresql/9.1/contrib/postgis-1.5/postgis.sql
    sudo -u postgres psql osm < /usr/share/postgresql/9.1/contrib/postgis-1.5/spatial_ref_sys.sql

Create user with YOUR name (somehow only works like this) postgis superuser? yes

    sudo -u postgres createuser -P YOURUSERNAME

Now, get a map file. These are available at e.g.
http://download.geofabrik.de/openstreetmap/

    wget http://download.geofabrik.de/openstreetmap/europe/germany/sachsen.osm.bz2
    unp sachsen.osm.bz2

Finally, import your image into the database

    osm2pgsql -m -d osm -S /usr/share/osm2pgsql/default.style -W  sachsen.osm

… See full entry