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I've flashed a 2GB SD card with the Raspbian wheezy image from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads, which boots up fine, but after typing "startx", I'm facing an empty desktop with the raspberry logo; nothing further happens. The pointer moves, I can switch to other TTYs with Ctrl+Alt+Fx, but that's it. No desktop icons or other GUI elements.

Is this supposed to happen? Do I need to manually set up a light desktop environment, or is there something else I need to do?

(I've tried the Arch Linux image too, and it too boots up fine to the command prompt. I don't seem to have hardware or power problems.)

df -h output:

enter image description here

rasper
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  • What are you using as a monitor and how is it connected to your Pi? – Steve Robillard Sep 01 '12 at 09:26
  • I'm using a 32 inch TV ("HD-Ready", 1366x768) connected via HDMI. Do you suspect that it's incorrectly set as the second display? – rasper Sep 01 '12 at 10:17
  • By the way, the resolution is incorrectly set as well: it's set to what appears to be 1920x1200. That probably has to do with the TV supplying wrong EDID information. – rasper Sep 01 '12 at 10:17
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    Is anything getting started? Could you have a look through the output from startx, ~/.xsession-errors and /var/log/Xorg.0.log and see if something fails. pstree -ph -u pi (while the X session is running) output may also be informative. – XTL Sep 03 '12 at 06:37
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    Does the whitespace around the raspberry reach to the edge of the screen? – Steve Robillard Sep 04 '12 at 18:47
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    Make sure you have a window manager/desktop environment set to execute in ~/.xinitrc. For example: exec openbox – Munkeh Sep 22 '12 at 11:42
  • Are you sure you are seeing the whole desktop? startx should be enough, it worked for me after a clean wheezy install out of the box. The raspberry as background is what i have too. And i se you are logged on as pi, is that the same user you logged in as when you did the startx? Because when you log in as root and type startx, you see a clean desktop because it has nothing configured (no icons) but i think you should see the start button at the lower left corner though – Michel Feb 21 '13 at 11:43
  • Did any of the answers help to solve your issue? If so, could you mark it as the accepted answer? Thx. :-) – Greenonline Sep 19 '15 at 14:50

6 Answers6

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To have a complete desktop environment (X + window manager + decorator) you should type:

/etc/init.d/lightdm start

If you want your Raspberry Pi to boot directly into lightdm, run:

sudo raspi-config

and set the second last option boot_behaviour to yes.

Avio
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I had this same problem, thinking it was something to do with the SD card or some random weird bug. I did fool around with formatting the card, but what I think did it was that I went into the raspi-config and set things like the clock, locale, and language up.

There are only 1 or 2 posts like this on the net, so either it's not a common problem, or it's a "der" moment. I'm new to Linux, so I guess the latter for me.

Once I set things up in raspi-config, this time I got the GUI I was expecting.

These videos gave me some food for thought to try those settings (mostly part 2):

Raspberry Pi running Raspbian - Part 1 - First boot and Raspi-config

Raspberry Pi running Raspbian - Part 2 - Booting to LXDE

YetAnotherRandomUser
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The same thing happened to me. I was stumped but then went into my advance options in sudo raspi-config and my memory was split to 512. I switched back to 256... now everything is perfect.

Greenonline
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geiovanni
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  • Hi geiovanni, Welcome to SE.Raspberry Pi. :-) Can you edit you answer to provide a few more details? Are you saying that reducing the memory allocated to the GPU was 512, and then when you reduced the GPU memory to 256, the desktop appeared correctly? If you could provide screenshots to support your answer, that would be great. – Greenonline Sep 19 '15 at 15:02
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It's basically the local desktop for the user.

You may need to add the content for user desktop and thereafter it will display the information.

The pi user will have default desktop icons come along with package.

Greenonline
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Bhargav
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I accidently did this before as well. I had used the lite version of raspbian rather than the full version with desktop mode. As you said you have a 2GB micro SD card, I would personally think it would be wise to get one with 8GB or higher and burn the desktop image to that SD card.

Darkest N2O
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Boot under pi user, NOT root..

ghcf
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