Password protected PDF’s on Linux

I’m feeling absolutely exhausted today, after a night of looking after Dorje. It’s not that he stays up all night screaming, rather that I sleep very lightly when I’m looking after him, and don’t go to sleep easily once I am awake. Normally I sleep very deeply, but when I’m awake I’m awake. With Dorje waking up during the night my rest is ruined.

Onto my day’s diversion. I needed to read some password-protected PDF’s that I’d previously downloaded from php|architect. They produce some great articles, and seeing as I’m going to be writing a column for PHP Builder, I thought it was time to grease some rust from my PHP brain. Also, since I now have only five working days left at IOL, I wanted to download the new PDF’s for the IOL developers before I leave.

It took me longer than I’d hoped. Mandrake’s default, KGhostview, didn’t do the trick, refusing to open the file, nor allowing me the option to open with a password. So I installed KPDF, which seemed the best of the bunch, but sadly version 0.3 seemed to have the same problem (which I believe has been solved with version 0.4, available with KDE 3.4). As luck would have it, Adobe have just released Acrobat Reader for Linux, and downloading and installing did the trick.