I'm starting to experiment with the Raspberry Pi form several purposes. For one of my little projects (RTL-SDR Scanner) I need a little TFT screen on the Pi. So I bought the 3.5 inch PiTFT 480x320 Touchscreen.
Getting it to work was not as easy as the tutorial would like it to be. I tried the 'advanced' setup with the DIY Installer script first, but that didn't work at all. The screen stayed bright white. No console or desktop to be found. So after that I tried the easy install where I needed to download an image with all the stuff included.
That didn't work either. All I got was a little cursor in the top left of the screen (note that I configured the raspi-config that it should load the desktop upon reboot).
No Pi desktop. Only a cursor
After some searching I tried to type 'startx' from the ssh-session, and the desktop started on the PiTFT screen..... So for some reason the xserver won't start upon reboot.
A quick search on the Interwebs showed that the following config resolved that.
pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo vi /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-fbdev.conf
and add the following text to the (new) file:
Section "Device" Identifier "myfb" Driver "fbdev" Option "fbdev" "/dev/fb1" EndSection
After a reboot the Raspberry Pi booted to the graphical user interface.
UPDATE: upon further testing I decided that it was not that efficient to automatically boot with the desktop on the PiTFT screen. So I removed the file (/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-fbdev.conf), and start the interface via startx from the console (or SSH).