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 However most versions of EFL in default repositories are out of date and will not compile more recent Enlightenment applications.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.
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".
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. 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.
Fedora includes an efl packge in its default repositories. This makes installing EFL a simple task:
sudo dnf install eflFedora does not come with gcc or cpp preinstalled. You'll need to install these to compile EFL-based applications:
sudo dnf install gcc cppNote that the version of EFL in Fedoras's official repositories may not be the most recent release. This can cause 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 following methods:
Fedora does not maintain a repository with a nightly, up to date, version of EFL. There is a user-maintained repository containing a nightly version of Enlightenment. Unfortunately installing packages with duplicate names from user-maintained repository is very complex. It's much easier to install and maintain EFL installing it from Enlightenments official packages and git repository, so this should be your first resort.
There are two versions of EFL 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's download site which is the focus of this section.
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.xzNote that you will have to change X.XX.X to the current version of EFL.
Once you have downloaded the archive file containing EFL unpack it with:
tar xvf efl-X.XX.X.tar.xzThis will create a folder named efl-X.XX.X.
Before you can compile and install EFL, you will have to install some software packages EFL requires:
sudo dnf install meson ninja-build gcc gcc-c++ doxygen openssl-devel systemd-devel libjpeg-turbo-devel glib2-devel gstreamer1-devel luajit-devel freetype-devel fontconfig-devel fribidi-devel xorg-x11-server-devel libXrender-devel giflib-devel libtiff-devel libwebp-devel openjpeg2-devel poppler-devel poppler-cpp-devel libspectre-devel LibRaw-devel librsvg2-devel libmount-devel dbus-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel libsndfile-devel libXcursor-devel libXcomposite-devel libXinerama-devel libXdamage-devel libXrandr-devel libXtst-devel libXScrnSaver-devel bullet-devel gstreamer1-plugins-base-devel harfbuzz-devel mesa-libGLES-devel mesa-libEGL-devel scim-devel libcurl-devel wayland-protocols-devel libxkbcommon-devel libxkbcommon-x11-devel libinput-devel libgbm-devel libexif-develOnce you have installed all dependencies cd into the efl-X.XX.X folder and run:
meson build
ninja -C build
sudo ninja -C build installThis will configure the files needed for compiling and installation.
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.serviceYou also have to make some files visible to pkgconfig. To do this open /etc/profile in a text editor as root (using sudo vi /etc/profile for instance) and add the following line to the end:
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib64/pkgconfigYou may also need to refresh your library path to make sure your apps can find the EFL libraries:
sudo ldconfigDownload the bleeding edge version of EFL by cloning it from the git repository.
By default, git is installed in Fedora, so the first step is to clone EFL's source code:
git clone https://git.enlightenment.org/enlightenment/eflThis will create a a directory named efl/. You can now cd into the efl/ folder and follow step 3, 4 and 5 from the above instructions.
For a faster and smaller download you can add the --depth 1 to the previous git command, in this way you will not get the full history of changes but just the latest snapshot of the source code.
If you are having problems compiling and installing EFL, you can come and seek advice on any of our IRC channels or post a ticket to our Phabricator.
If you would like to install EFL on a different operating system visit the Installing EFL page.