I would like to use inkscapes' command line tools to export pdf flies to bitmap format like this:
# inkscape test.pdf --export-png=test.png

This produces an error:
(inkscape:16022): Gdk-CRITICAL **: gdk_display_list_devices: assertion `GDK_IS_DISPLAY (display)' failed
Entity: line 1: parser error : Start tag expected, '<' not found
%PDF-1.2
^
Entity: line 1: parser error : Start tag expected, '<' not found
%PDF-1.2
^

I also tried this command (with the same result):
# inkscape test.pdf --export-plain-svg=test.svg

(inkscape:11222): Gdk-CRITICAL **: gdk_display_list_devices: assertion `GDK_IS_DISPLAY (display)' failed
Entity: line 1: parser error : Start tag expected, '<' not found
%PDF-1.2
^
Entity: line 1: parser error : Start tag expected, '<' not found
%PDF-1.2
^

I installed inkscape today on RHEL:
# inkscape -V
Inkscape 0.46 (Apr 14 2008)

Any help will be very appreciated.

Nevermind. I now see that the command line functionality of Inkscape hasn't really been developed.
I was hoping that it could handle rasterizing my EPS files better than Ghostscript but that doesn't seem to be the case.

I tried converting EPS files to SVG using pstoedit and the results were totally unacceptable - the SVG file didn't resemble the orignal EPS in the least.
I also tried converting EPS to PDF with Ghostscript which went well but the PDF couldn't be converted back to SVG any better than the EPS file.

I will just stick to Ghostscript.