Installing EFL on XXXXX

The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) power millions of systems from mobile phones to set-top boxes, desktops, laptops, game systems and more. You will need EFL if you want to develop apps for Enlightenment and for any of the devices that use Enlightenment for its visual interface.

This tutorial describes several ways of installing EFL on your system. You will only need one, so use the index on the right to navigate to the most useful method for you.

Many distributions offer EFL as an installable package from their default repositories. It is only a question of using your distribution's software management system to choose EFL and have the system install it. However, most versions of EFL in default repositories are very out of date and will not compile the more modern Enlightenment applications. If this is something you can live with, you look at the "From Distribution Repositories" section below.

Often distributions provide a special repository maintained by users, or a method of integrating a bleeding edge version of EFL with your software management system. This has the advantage of that, once set up, you can maintain your EFL installation up to date simply along with the updates of the rest of your system. If your distribution provides this service, take look at the "Installing from a Special Repository" section.

The Enlightenment developers provide a pre-packaged source of EFL. Although not bleeding edge, it is up to date and considered stable for production environments. You can download it, compile and install it yourself by following the instructions in "Installing from Packaged Source".

You can also download the source code, but this time the most recent bleeding edge version, from our git repositories. This will provide you with the latest code that is updated on a nightly basis. To get the most recent and bleeding edge version of EFL, read the "Installing from Git" section.

Whichever installation method you use in "Compiling EFL Applications" you can read about how you can compile your Enlightenment applications.

From Distribution Repositories

[Instructions on how to install from official repo if available]

Installing from a Special Repository

[Instructions on how to install from a special repo if available]

Installing from Packaged Source

There are two versions available form the Enlightenment website. One is a packaged and available from the EFL's download site. The other is the nightly bleeding edge version which you can download using git. This section deals with installing with the packaged version available from the EFL's download site.

Step 1: Downloading Stable Version

Download the latest version of EFL and check it against its SHA256 hash:

wget https://download.enlightenment.org/rel/libs/efl/efl-X.XX.X.tar.xz
wget https://download.enlightenment.org/rel/libs/efl/efl-X.XX.X.tar.xz.sha256
cat efl-X.XX.X.tar.xz.sha256; sha256sum efl-X.XX.X.tar.xz

Note that you will have to change X.XX.X for the actual version of EFL.

Step 2: Unpacking

Once you have the archive file containing EFL in your hard disk, unpack it with:

tar xvf efl-X.XX.X.tar.xz

This will produce a folder called efl-X.XX.X.

Step 3: Installing Dependencies

Before you can compile and install EFL, you will have to install some software packages EFL needs:

[Install dependencies]

Step 4: Building and Installing

Once you have installed all the packages EFL needs, cd into the efl-X.XX.X folder and run

./configure
make
sudo make install

This will configure the files needed for compiling, actually compile the software, and then install it.

Step 5: Carrying out Post Installation Tasks

As you are not installing to /usr but to /usr/local, you will have to ensure that some files are visible to dbus:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/share/dbus-1/services/org.enlightenment.Ethumb.service /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.enlightenment.Ethumb.service

You may also need to refresh your library path to make sure your apps can find the EFL libraries:

sudo ldconfig

Installing from Git

You can also get the bleeding edge version of EFL by cloning it from the git repository.

Step 1: Installing git and Cloning

By default, git is not installed in XXXXX, so the first step is to install it:

[install git]

Next clone EFL's source code:

git clone https://git.enlightenment.org/core/efl.git

This will create a a directory called efl/.

Step 2: Installing Dependencies

You will need to install some tools to build the configuration file:

[Install autoconf autopoint libtool etc]

As well as the dependencies specific for EFL:

[Install dependencies]

Step 3: Configuring the Software

Now you can cd into the efl* directory and run the *autoreconf script to create and configure the software ready for compilation:

./autogen.sh

Once configured, you can compile the software with:

make
sudo make install

Step 4: Carrying out Post Installation Tasks