Installing EFL on FreeBSD

The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) power millions of systems from mobile phones to set-top boxes, desktops, laptops, game systems and more. You'll 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 to install EFL on your system. You will only need to use one of these. Select your chosen method using the index on the right.

Many distributions offer EFL as an installable package from their default repositories. In this case you only need to use your distribution's software management system to install. However most versions of EFL in default repositories are out of date and will not compile more recent Enlightenment applications. If this is not an issue for you read through the "From Distribution Repositories" section below.

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, compile and install it yourself by following the instructions in "Installing from Packaged Source".

You can also download the source code for the most recent version from the EFL git repositories. This will provide you with the latest code, which is updated on a nightly basis. To get started, read the section "Installing from Git".

Whichever installation method you use, visit "Compiling EFL Applications" to discover how to compile your Enlightenment applications.

From Distribution Repositories

FreeBSD contains an instance of the EFL package in its official repositories. To install it run the following command as root:

pkg install efl

This will give you a working EFL installation.

The version in FreeBSD's official repositories may lag behind the latest version of EFL and give you problems when trying to compile examples from tutorials in this documentation. If this is the case, install a more recent version of EFL using one of the methods below.

Installing from Packaged Source

There are two versions of EFL available from the Enlightenment website. One is the nightly bleeding edge version which you can download using git. The other is packaged and available from the EFL download page, which is the focus of this section.

Step 1: Downloading Stable Version

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

wget --no-check-certificate https://download.enlightenment.org/rel/libs/efl/efl-X.XX.X.tar.xz
wget --no-check-certificate 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'll need to change X.XX.X to the actual version of EFL e.g. efl-1.20.6.tar.xz

Step 2: Unpacking

Once you've downloaded the archive file containing EFL to your hard drive unpack it with:

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

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

Step 3: Installing Dependencies

To install the software packages required by EFL:

su
pkg install meson ninja python3 bullet fribidi gettext-tools giflib git gstreamer1 gstreamer1-plugins-core luajit check libraw libspectre librsvg2 libexif libtool openssl poppler pkgconf pulseaudio shared-mime-info xcb-util-keysyms scim webp xorg xorg-server

Note: Versions of EFL greater than 1.23.x use the base installation of OpenSSL (see instructions for building from Git).

Step 4: Building and Installing

Set up these environment variables before building.

setenv PKG_CONFIG_PATH /usr/local/libdata/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
setenv CFLAGS "-I/usr/local/include"
setenv LDFLAGS "-L/usr/local/lib"

Once you have installed all the required packages cd into the efl-X.XX.X folder and and set environment variables run

meson build -Dsystemd=false -Dv4l2=false -Deeze=false -Dinput=false
ninja -C build
su
ninja -C build install

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

Installing from Git

You can also install 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 FreeBSD, so the first step is to install it:

pkg install git

Next clone EFL's source code:

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

This will create a a directory named efl/.

Step 2: Installing Dependencies

To install the dependencies specific to EFL:

pkg install meson ninja python3 bullet fribidi gettext-tools giflib gstreamer1 gstreamer1-plugins-core luajit check libraw libspectre librsvg2 libexif libtool poppler pkgconf pulseaudio shared-mime-info xcb-util-keysyms scim webp xorg xorg-server

Note: Versions of EFL greater than 1.23.x use the base installation of OpenSSL. Therefore there is no need for the OpenSSL port to be installed.

Step 3: Configuring the Software