qmakespec

had some problems getting pdfedit to compile because i had no QMAKESPEC envvar ... not really familiar with qmake.
setting
export QMAKESPEC=/usr/lib/qt-3.3/mkspecs/
helped.
in the end i stumbled over pdftk though ... that was readily installed via yum and a simple pdftk v.pdf cat 2-8 output out1.pdf
did a great job of putting pages 2 to 8 into a separate pdf