HOWTO: installation of E17 from CVS

[TimmyJ]

This is just a quick how-to on downloading, compiling, and installing the desktop shell Enlightenment 17 from the CVS repository. E17 is still in development, so do not expect a fully stable, bug-free environment. That said: I use E17 on a daily basis and rarely run into any hiccups.

READ: Before following this guide please remove any previously installed versions of E17 (aka from any repository) as they may cause errors in the process.

A quick disclaimer: this is my first how-to, so feel free to offer any constructive criticism.

Lets Start!

1.) First we want to install all required packages for E17, and all the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries to install. This list may be a bit of overkill, but it will get the job done.

sudo apt-get install build-essential cvs libtool libltdl3-dev automake1.9 autotools-dev libpopt-dev libcurl3-dev libx11-dev x11proto-xext-dev libbz2-dev libid3tag0-dev libpng12-dev libtiff4-dev libungif4-dev libjpeg62-dev libssl-dev libfreetype6-dev bison flex xlibs-dev gettext libimlib2-dev libxml2-dev libxcursor-dev libgtk1.2-dev autoconf pkg-config libpng3-dev libxine-dev libxkbfile-dev libsqlite3-dev giblib-dev libxmu-dev libxdamage-dev libxcomposite-dev libtag1-dev libtagc0-dev giblib-dev libasound2-dev

2.) Now that all that is out of the way we need to get the script that will make downloading/compiling/installing E17 very easy. All credit goes to Morlenxus for this great tool.

From your home directory, run the following command

wget http://omicron.homeip.net/projects/easy_e17/easy_e17.sh

3.) Now we need to made the script executable and then run it! This script will prompt you for your sudo password, enter it. This script will take quite some time to run, so try to be patient NOTES: This script will install all the applications and libraries it installs into /opt/e17 so as not to interfere with other versions of enlightenment. You can change this location through scripts options. This script will install ALL the applications and libraries available in the E17 CVS tree. You may or may not want all these apps. You can easily skip any library or app using the --skip flag with the script.

chmod +x easy_e17.sh
./easy_e17.sh -i

4.) Now we have enlightenment all installed and working. The next step it create a desktop entry so that you can log-in to enlightenment from GDM.

Create a desktop entry called e17.desktop

sudo gedit /usr/share/xsessions/e17.desktop

Copy/Paste the following into the newly created file

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=E-17
Comment=
Exec=/opt/e17/bin/enlightenment
Icon=
Type=Application

Thats all you really need to do. Now using enligthenment is as simple as logging out, selecting the E-17 session and logging back in. Any time you want to update enlightenment and related libs/apps, simply re-run the easy_e17 script. For more information on the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, and the applications that use them, please see http://www.get-e.org and
http://www.enlightenment.org.au

Suggestion: due to the fact that enlightenment was installed in /opt/e17 it is a good idea to add /opt/e17/bin to your PATH so that it is easier to run all those great applications you just installed.

To do this open your /etc/environment with your favorite text editor

sudo gedit /etc/environment

then add the following lines to the bottom

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/opt/e17/bin