X Server Not Starting on Raspbian Jessie

Question

After deciding to use zsh, I started using the GUI again, as it supports Powerline fonts for the oh my zsh theme. Anyways, I used sudo raspi-config and set the boot option to GUI with required login. After restarting, I noticed a small box in the top right of the screen. Clicking on it brought up a menu with three desktop environments: Default XSession, LXDE, and Openbox, with Default XSession selected. I decided to try LXDE, and after logging in I was greeted with LXDE. I went back to the login screen and selected Openbox. Logging in presented me with a grey screen and a mouse. After a few minutes of waiting, I decided to reboot, so I went to a TTY and typed reboot.

I switched the DE back to Default XSession and tried to log in. It just went back to the login. So I changed Boot to GUI autologin, and tried again. It just went to the login. I tried rebooting to CLI and typing startx, but it stopped and said that it shut down the X server.

If it helps, I'm using Raspbian.

Answer 1

There are not really enough details in your question to find the source of the failing graphical login, but usually something important for the X session doesn't start up properly and hence the session setup fails and you're back at the login screen.

To debug such issues further, have a look at the end of the log file /home/pi/.xsession-errors. Maybe you want to add your findings to the posting retro-actively so you can get better fitting and less generic answers.

One guess though: Did you make zsh the default /bin/sh, too? Because that's not supported by zsh since its sh compatibility mode is not good enough for such a purpose.