Canvas

Executive summary
Evas is the preferred graphics engine as it provides most eye-candy.
It requires Imlib2 and freetype2 and supports a number of optional libraries.

Eyecandy component

The canvas is what evidence puts the icons of the icon-view and the shelf on. You may use GNOME-canvas, or the enlightenment canvas, evas. GNOME-canvas would be part of your distribution of GNU/Linux and may well be on your system already. evas means one more file to download, but it also means having a much fancier icon-view in the end.
You may download the packages, or build from CVS.

Library	Used for...
freetype2	needed by evas. required, but I bet this is on your system already.
imlib2	fancy thumbnails. without imlib2, you will only get thumbnails (image previews) for PNG and JPG format images; with it, for about a dozen others, as well as previews for TrueType fonts. some theme-plugins such as the text-path also use imlib2 for fancier looks (but may usually be built to less effect without imlib2). highly recommened when building from source; required for ready-made binary packages.
ebg	enlightened background. ebony is a (legacy) editor to create enlightenment 17 backdrops. to use ebony, you need ebg. ebg backgrounds are stored in edb-files, so if want ebg, you'll need edb as well. required only when using ebony.
edb	enlightened data-base. needed only if you want to use legacy data files from the first incarnation of enlightenment-17 that never made it out of CVS. ebony-created enlightenment 17 backgrounds and etcher-created e17 scrollbars come in this format. optional; required when using ebg.
eet	enlightened compressed archive. for now, one more format to thumbnail. will become more important in the future as edje/EWL uses it. optional.