Give exiftool a try, it is available from the package libimage-exiftool-perl in the repositories.
As an example, If you have a pdf file called drawing.pdf and you want to update its metadata, Use the utility, exiftool, in this way:
exiftool -Title="This is the Title" -Author="Happy Man" -Subject="PDF Metadata" drawing.pdf
For some reason the Subject entered ends up in the keywords field of the metadata in the pdf file. not a problem in some cases, even desirable, however, this may be problematic, evince and the nautilus metadata previewer do not show this but Adobe Acrobat viewer and PDF-XChange viewer does.
The program will create a backup of the original file if you do not use the; -overwrite_original switch, this means a duplicate will exist in the folder where the updated pdf is. From example above; a file named ; drawing.pdf_original will be created.
use the overwrite switch at your own risk, my suggestion is not to use it and script something to move this file to a better location just in case.
I believe you need to install a dummy package to fool the system into believing the distribution's Tex system is installed, one of the best instructions I have seen to do this is here: http://blogs.ethz.ch/ubuntu/2011/03/14/tex-live-2010-installation/ , it is for Texlive 2010 but just make the modifications to suite your version and platform and it will work.
It essentially means using the equivs package to build the dummy package, for you to install, you still need to install tex-common texinfo and lmodern, perl-tk` is used by the Texlive update system GUI Implementation so if you want to run tlmgr with a Gui you should install it.
Best Answer
As far as I know, you won't find a single standalone binary that will do this for you. The typical utility is called
pdflatexand is part of the TeX Live package. It's in the repositories, so simply opening the terminal and typing the below will installpdflatexand lots of other essential TeX stuff: