RetroPie Plus Desktop (lxde)... but never stops running ... :-(

Loatman

Hi Everyone. So I installed the latest version of RetroPie on my Raspberry Pi 3. Everything worked very well UNTIL i decided it would be good to have a desktop. The PLAN was to have a desktop start up after I closed up Emulationstation (using the startx command). So I found this great video on how to load lxde post RetroPie install. It does launch well, but when I try to quit and get to a prompt to type in "emulationstation", it says "x is still running" even though i already logged out :-(

Two questions: 1. How can i get it to TRULY stop so I can run emulationstation at the prompt. 2. do i even want to have lxde? I thought about having the normal Raspberry Pi GUI, but I don't know how to install that after RetroPie install.

Any guidance you may have would be greatly appreciated!

Loatman

RetroResolution

@Loatman Hi,

I'm not sure what is causing LXDE to fail to shut down, but I have an alternative method for setting up a Pi to run Raspbian Desktop, RetroPie (and Kodi) - I've written a couple of guides if you're interested:

Multipurpose Raspberry Pi: Installing a Media, Gaming, PC Replacement

Multipurpose Raspberry Pi – Part 2: Adding a Menu to Access RetroPie, Kodi, and the Raspbian Desktop

Loatman

This is a great guide! Thanks! I set it up last night and got both the GUI and Emulationstation to work well. However, if I boot to prompt and try startx, it doesn't work (but i CAN type emulationstation and get to there). So what I have to do is get to ES and then set the boot config to boot directly into the GUI. But then I don't have an "exit to command line" option. but that's a small price to pay. Hopefully, I'll figure out what's preventing my startx command from working.

Thanks again!

RetroResolution

@Loatman Glad you liked the guide. Hopefully we can resolve this issue with startx; I've run through the installation instructions at least four times, using three different recent versions of Raspbian Jessie on a Pi 3; it'd be good to work out what the issue is.

The clue may be in you saying you don't have an 'exit to command line' option.

It's a little confusing as you seem to have the system configured to boot directly to the console, which happens when you use the Raspberry Pi Configuration tool (Raspian desktop, Menu, Preferences) to select Boot to: CLI. Setting this option is also what adds 'exit to command line' to the Shutdown menu in Raspbian.

Did you set your system to boot to the command line in some other way?
Just to clarify, is the prompt where you type startx the main console - e.g. does you Pi boot, scrolling a few pages of status messages, and leave you with a full-screen command line?
When you run startx what happens? Do you get an error message?
Did you use the option to resize the filesystem (assuming you weren't using the latest Raspbian image, which seems to run this automatically now)?

You can check the amount of free disk space from the command line with:

df -k

Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root       61271084 36856840  21869428  63% /
devtmpfs          437064        0    437064   0% /dev
tmpfs             441400    67696    373704  16% /dev/shm
tmpfs             441400     6268    435132   2% /run
tmpfs               5120        4      5116   1% /run/lock
tmpfs             441400        0    441400   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1     61384    20960     40424  35% /boot
tmpfs              88280        8     88272   1% /run/user/1000

My system has a 64GB SD Card. In the above example, the main partition dev/root is showing a total of 61271084 1k blocks; divide this by 1048576 to obtain 58.43GB total, of which 63% is used

Btw: apologies for the delay in responding, I didn't have 'watch' set on the thread.