Four hours later I got it....
For anyone else out there, this is the easiest way I can find.
AbriaSoft.com has a sort of turn key system for installing Apache/MySQL/PHP. They recently released a version of their installer that includes PostgreSQL.
Download this package, its a tar file. You will need to create an account.
http://www.abriasoft.com/products/product16.phpIts the merlin server. Download the free version.
Do Not Install it!!! It will totally mess up e-smith. Untar the file, in the Abria*/merlin folder there are a bunch of rpms for postgresql. Install the dev,clients, and server.... that's it.
Seems long... but the alternative is trying to get gcc working on the e-smith server to install source.
Anyway..... it actually puts a postgresql script in the "/etc/rc.d/init.d" so that's that.... just run the script of restart if you want.