ghostscript problem in F11

[Gavin Simpson]

Dear List,

I'm trying to use ghostscript to merge a couple of PDFs. The approach
I'm using has worked reliably on Fedora 7-10 (IIRC) however I'm
experiencing a problem when trying to run my gs command on Fedora 11
on a new desktop. I am running the following:

gs -dAutoRotatePages=/None -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress
-dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite
sOutputFile=foo.pdf doc1.pdf doc2.pdf doc3.pdf

This fails with the message:

GPL Ghostscript 8.70 (2009-07-31)
Copyright (C) 2009 Artifex Software, Inc.  All rights reserved.
This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details.
**** Unable to open the initial device, quitting.

My web searches indicate that this means gs can't open the output
file. I'm running this in a directory in my Home and I have rw
permissions there. All the files are located in this one directory.

I'm a bit stumped now as to what to try next. There is some indication
(from the web searches I did) that this may be related to permissions
on the temporary location where gs is working initially. However I
have no idea how to find out what/where this location may be, how to
change it etc.

Here are my gs versions:
$ yum list all | grep ghost
ghostscript.x86_64                    8.70-1.fc11                 @updates
ghostscript-fonts.noarch              5.50-20.fc11                installed

Any help, much appreciated.

G

[Ps: Yes, I know I can do this with one of several GUI tools, but the
command line used to work and I'd like to get it working on my new
desktop.]