[pdftex] naive question regarding concatenating pdfs

[Thomas Esser]

> Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, when I run texconfig formats,
> it screws up my terminal settings and appears to have no other effect. I

It should work fine in an xterm. Nevertheless,
  fmtutil --edit; fmtutil --missing
should do the trick.

> This is using the tetex rpms from Mandrake. I tried installing from source
> - make worked fine, but make install died partway through, and also screwed

"make install" calls texconfig (in teTeX-1.0) and if that screws up your
terminal, something else must have been wrong. Did you really unpack the
texmf tarball at the right place? The easiest way to do it right is to
follow QuickInstall.

If you really want to use pdftex, you should switch to teTeX-beta
anyway:
  http://tug.org/teTeX/

Thomas