Since I needed it as part of my job, I finally got around to finishing up the Geonames scripts in my github repository misc_gis_scripts.  In the geonames subdirectory is a bash script called dogeonames.sh.  Create a PostGIS database, edit the bash file, and then run it and it will download and populate your Geonames database for you.

Note that I’m not using the alternatenamesv2 file that they’re distributing now.  I checked with a hex editor and they’re not actually including all fields on each line, and Postgres will not import a file unless each column is there.  I’ll probably add in a Python file to fix it at some point but not now 🙂