Installing EFL on Arch

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 However most versions of EFL in default repositories are out of date and will not support more recent Enlightenment applications. If this is not an issue for you, read through the "From Distribution Repositories" section below.

Distributions often provide a special repository maintained by users or a method of integrating a bleeding edge version of EFL with your software management system. This means that once installed you can keep EFL current just by running system updates. If your distribution offers this, take a look at the section "Installing from a Special Repository".

We maintain such a repository. To add it to your pacman configuration just do one of these, depending which tool you have installed. Just remove sudo if you are already doing this as root.

curl

curl https://download.enlightenment.org/distros/arch/archlinux/arch/repo.txt -o - | sudo tee -a /etc/pacman.conf

wget

wget https://download.enlightenment.org/distros/arch/archlinux/arch/repo.txt -O - | sudo tee -a /etc/pacman.conf

Then to install the packages for the first time:

sudo pacman -Sy && sudo pacman -S efl-git enlightenment-git terminology-git rage-git ecrire-git entice-git evisum-git

They will be updated whenever you sync your package repo from now on automatically.


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 usually of stable quality. 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

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

pacman -S efl

This will give you a working EFL installation.

The version in Arch's official repositories may lag behind the latest version of EFL. This may cause problems when trying to compile examples from tutorials in this guide. If this happens, install a more recent version of EFL using one of the methods listed below.

Installing from a Special Repository

You can use Arch's package management system to install an up-to-date version of EFL from the Arch User Repository (AUR) named efl-git. Using the efl-git AUR is relatively simple and makes your EFL package easy to maintain using Arch's package management system, pacman. There is also enlightenment-git, rage-git, terminology-git

Step 1: Download Meta Package

Download the files containing the required meta-information to install EFL from the AUR:

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/efl-git.git

Step 2: Install Build Tools and Dependencies

In order to build EFL from source, you'll need some tools:

pacman -S gcc fakeroot binutils meson ninja pkg-config ccache debugedit

The makepkg script in the following step will handle all the dependencies for you.

Step 3: Make Package

Now cd into the new efl-git directory and build the package with:

makepkg -s

This process will download EFL from the Enlightenment git repositories, run the configuration and download and install the remaining dependencies. It will also compile and install the software (locally) then build a viable and installable package for your system. None of these steps need to be run as root.

Step 4: Install the package

When makepkg is finished you'll find a file in your directory with a name like efl-git-X.XX.XX.XXXXX.XXXXXXXXX-X-XXXXXX.pkg.tar.xz. This is the actual package you can install. To do this as root run:

sudo pacman -U efl-git-*.pkg.tar.xz

pacman will now install EFL for you.

Installing from Packaged Source

There are two versions available from the Enlightenment website. One is the bleeding edge version which you can download using git. The other is packaged and available from the EFL download site, 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 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 to the actual version of EFL.

Step 2: Unpacking

Once you have the archive file containing EFL on your hard disk 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

Before you can compile and install EFL you need to install the required software packages and tools:

pacman -S meson ninja pkgconf gcc binutils python2 avahi bullet curl fontconfig harfbuzz fribidi gst-plugins-base-libs luajit libexif libgl libinput libpulse libspectre libraw librsvg libwebp libxcomposite libxcursor libxinerama libxkbcommon libxp libxrandr libxss libunwind mesa openjpeg2 poppler shared-mime-info ttf-font scim libibus glib2 pulseaudio gst-plugins-base gst-plugins-good gst-plugins-bad gst-plugins-ugly gst-libav libreoffice

Step 4: Building and Installing

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

meson build
ninja -C build
sudo ninja -C build install

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

Step 5: Carrying out Post Installation Tasks

You also have to make some files visible to pkgconfig. To do this open /etc/profile in a text editor as root (using for example sudo nano /etc/profile) and add the following line to the end:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

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 download 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 Arch, so first install it:

pacman -S git

Next clone EFL's source code:

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

This will create a directory named efl/.

Step 2: Installing Dependencies

You'll need to install some tools to build the configuration file:

pacman -S meson ninja pkgconf gcc binutils check python2

You also must install the dependencies specific to EFL:

pacman -S avahi bullet curl fontconfig harfbuzz fribidi gst-plugins-base-libs luajit libexif libgl libinput libpulse libspectre libraw librsvg libwebp libxcomposite libxcursor libxinerama libxkbcommon libxp libxrandr libxss libunwind mesa openjpeg2 poppler shared-mime-info ttf-font scim libibus glib2 pulseaudio gst-plugins-base gst-plugins-good gst-plugins-bad gst-plugins-ugly gst-libav libreoffice

Step 3: Configuring the Software

You can now cd into the efl\ directory and run the autoreconf script to create and configure the software, ready for compilation:

meson build

Once configured, compile the software with:

ninja -C build
sudo ninja -C build install

Step 4: Carrying out Post Installation Tasks

You also have to make some files visible to pkgconfig. To do this open /etc/profile in a text editor as root (using for example sudo nano /etc/profile) and add the following line to the end:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

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

sudo ldconfig

Troubleshooting

If you are having problems compiling and installing EFL you can find help on our IRC channels or post a ticket to our Gitea.

Installing on Other Operating Systems

If you would like to install EFL on a different operating system visit the Installing EFL page.