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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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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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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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