Installing PDFtk on CentOS/RHEL/Scientific Linux 7
Update: This procedure works in RHEL/Rocky/Alma/Oracle Linux 8 and Amazon Linux 2023!
In the transition to CentOS 7, the GNU compiler for the Java programming language libgcj was discontinued. This is partially due to it being dropped by the GCC suite. As it turns out, shared library linking of libgcj.so.10 from CentOS 6 is binary compatible with PDFtk. We use PDFtk in our office for collating documents that have been scanned, and it works great!
After searching online and finding lots of links with various levels of success and server admins having used PDFtk for over a decade, we decided to package it and provide it to the community.
Installation is simple, depending on your architecture:
x86_64
yum localinstall https://www.linuxglobal.com/static/blog/pdftk-2.02-1.el7.x86_64.rpmi686
yum localinstall https://www.linuxglobal.com/static/blog/pdftk-2.02-1.el7.i686.rpmAfter Updating
If you are reading this article, then you probably just upgraded your system. Now would be a great time to consider security for your application and server infrastructure. There are many services that we offer including support, security, maintenance, monitoring, backups, and live SQL backup replication. We even offer a security hardened hosting environment!
Please let us know if you have any issues with these packages or if we may be of service!
Update: 2017-01-26
Some have asked for the .spec that we are using. Really are we are doing is repacking libgcj.so.10* which we pulled out of CentOS 6 libgcj-4.4.7-17.el6. PDFtk was downloaded as an RPM from their site unmodified except that we converted it to a tar and added libgcj. You may need to edit the spec to make it build on your system, but it works in our build environment: https://www.linuxglobal.com/static/blog/pdftk.spec
-Eric