Display PDF files with a linux server.

One of these days a web server will be much of an appliance as the dish washer, tv, or A/C system. There are already electronic photo frames and displaying interactive web content is the next logical step.Traditionally web content distribution was limited to businesses, Now distributing web content in the home will become of importance with smart tv's. Smart t.v.'s will have web server capabilities before we know it. Would it not be neat to show off your lastest instructibles on the tv or some other web enabled device!

Recent, I bought a Chumby aka Insignia Infocast to display web pages and it works great for that. But then I wanted to be able to read pdf files (ebooks) also. The browser I am using with the Chumby really does not support PDF files. So there had to be away around this issue. Web browser is good at displaying web pages, so why not convert my pdf files to html. You should be able to do this with any touchpad or internet viewer. We are in the process of converting our instructables from pdf to html. We are also in the process of converting our personal ebooks to html so that they can be read anywhere without the need of a expensive proprietary ebooks reader ( i.e. nook, kindle, and etc), Existing laptop, nettop, or desktop will do just fine. Enjoy!

Reference instructables:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Introduction-to-installing-web-apps/
http://www.instructables.com/id/Cheap-touchpad/

Needed:
linux web server (once files are converted they should be able to be used on Apple Mac or MSWindows servers also)
Touchpad or equivalent with access to the web server.

Step 1: Software setup on the server.

On Ubuntu at least there is a package called the poppler-utils. They will do several things including converting pdf to html files.

To install:
Use your gui (graphical user interface) package manager or from the command line:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install poppler-utils

That is all there is to it to install the utilites.