Solved I think that I have met my match

"Uh.. I don't know what to do!"
Dear Sir, You know me so well. Also, at this moment I'm able to login to both Xfce and Cinnamon, but not because I was smart enough to fix it. The only reason I can now login to my desktop is because I was able to clone my computer's hard drive from another drive which also had the same installation of FreeBSD on it. I managed to get it working again, but not by a very clever method.
 
Ok, OP only performs dry-run.

For what I experience, it definitely would print some messages informing packages are not being upgraded due to lock when run with the actual pkg-upgrade command.

Let me verify the dry run command on my setup once I back to my desk.
I have verified on my desk PC. It looks like now pkg upgrade will not upgrade nvidia-drm-* related pacakges eventhough there is no locking. I currently on 15.0-RELEASE-p6.

So the only package I locked now is the nvidia-settings, when running

Code:
pkg lock -l      
Currently locked packages:
nvidia-settings-580.142

List all the nvidia packages
Code:
pkg info nvidia\*
nvidia-driver-580-580.142
nvidia-drm-61-kmod-580-580.142.1500068
nvidia-kmod-580-580.142.1500068
nvidia-settings-580.142

Try to upgrade to latest but nvidia packages now will not go to 595.
Code:
doas pkg upgrade
Updating FreeBSD-ports repository catalogue...
FreeBSD-ports repository is up to date.
Updating FreeBSD-ports-kmods repository catalogue...
FreeBSD-ports-kmods repository is up to date.
All repositories are up to date.
Checking for upgrades (2 candidates):  50%

nvidia-settings-580.142 is locked and may not be modified
Checking for upgrades (2 candidates): 100%
Processing candidates (2 candidates): 100%
Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)
Your packages are up to date.


Dry run does show the message of letting you know the package that is locked and will not be upgraded. I.e nvidia-settings.
Code:
doas pkg upgrade -n
Updating FreeBSD-ports repository catalogue...
FreeBSD-ports repository is up to date.
Updating FreeBSD-ports-kmods repository catalogue...
FreeBSD-ports-kmods repository is up to date.
All repositories are up to date.
Checking for upgrades (2 candidates):  50%

nvidia-settings-580.142 is locked and may not be modified
Checking for upgrades (2 candidates): 100%
Processing candidates (2 candidates): 100%
Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)
Your packages are up to date.
 
Looking at what the OP has done, he does already have a lock on nvidia-settings, but he doesn't get the same outcome as you. The unwanted upgrade seems to go ahead for him, but not you.

I don't use Nvidia or package locking etc. I'm just trying to follow along.

Same version of FreeBSD and pkg?
 
OP most likely is on older FreeBSD 15.0 and pkg version.

I do encountered such black screen on 14.3 due to same issue on the Nvidia driver upgrade, but I managed drop into vty and performed packages downgrading.

My personal view which may or may not be the better solution, is for OP to do clean re-install and lock the Nvidia and drm packages to isolate the issue of not be able to lock packages. If OP decide to stay on FreeBSD.
 
Well, since I have both Xfce and Cinnamon, and I'm not sure which one I want to keep, should I still make such a modification to my .xinitrc file?

You are not making a "forever" choice here - you can keep (both) Cinnamon, XFCE and/or as many (other) window managers installed as you like on your FreeBSD system. No restriction there. And always feel free to install and try as many X Window Desktops as you like ! That's 1/2 the fun of using FreeBSD :cool: !

The .xinitrc file is just saying "What window manager do you want me to start right now?". So just pick the window manager that you want to start (right at this moment). For the moment -- let's just say Cinnamon. So you would place the following into .xinitrc to start Cinnamon:

Code:
% echo "exec dbus-launch --exit-with-x11 ck-launch-session cinnamon-session" > ~/.xinitrc

That was copied/pasted from the FreeBSD Desktop Handbook web page.
 
Dear Sir, You know me so well.

I was just giving you the "software perspective" on things. Software is not all intelligent and has to be given hints or configuration on what we want the software to do. By setting the Cinnamon specific "initialization value" into .xinitrc we are saying "Hay X Windows! I would like to run the Cinnamon desktop".
 
Just out of curiosity - what NVidia card are you running on your system?

I am running an NVidia GeForce RTX 4070 on my NVidia system:

Code:
$ dmesg | grep GPU
nvidia0: <NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU> on ...
[drm] [nvidia-drm] ...
$
 
I do encountered such black screen on 14.3 due to same issue on the Nvidia driver upgrade, but I managed drop into vty and performed packages downgrading.

That's interesting ! -- what type of Nvidia card do you have installed?

Are you using "nvidia-drm" or "nvidia-modeset"?

Also - did you disable "lightdm" and try to start X Windows with "startx" at the shell prompt?
 
That's interesting ! -- what type of Nvidia card do you have installed?

Are you using "nvidia-drm" or "nvidia-modeset"?

I have RTX2080.

Not sure what you mean by nvidia-drm or nvidia-modset.

My understanding is nvidia-drm is the driver for drm and modeset is the option need to be enabled for in kernel display management which I enabled.
 
what NVidia card are you running on your system?
Not sure how useful the below information is, but below is what I found.

Code:
root@Asus:/ # dmesg | grep GPU
[drm] [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID 0x00000100] Loading driver

However, I found the below information also.

Code:
root@Asus:/ # pciconf -lv | grep -B3 display
vgapci0@pci0:1:0:0:    class=0x030000 rev=0xa1 hdr=0x00 vendor=0x10de device=0x1d01 subvendor=0x1043 subdevice=0x85f4
    vendor     = 'NVIDIA Corporation'
    device     = 'GP108 [GeForce GT 1030]'
    class      = display
 
I do encountered such black screen on 14.3 due to same issue on the Nvidia driver upgrade, but I managed drop into vty and performed packages downgrading
I was able to use Alt + F2 to get to a another terminal, but then I was sure what to do, and I could not accomplish much. But then I found the below message from another poster.

pkg delete nvidia-driverand
pkg install nvidia-driver-580
I have written the above on a post it note, and I will keep it handy if it happens again.
 
Also, I think that someone asked me to supply info regarding the version of FreeBSD I am using, so I have included the below info, even though I'm not certain that it is useful.

Code:
root@Asus:/home/Simon # freebsd-version -k
15.0-RELEASE-p7
root@Asus:/home/Simon # freebsd-version -r
15.0-RELEASE-p7
root@Asus:/home/Simon # freebsd-version -u
15.0-RELEASE-p7
root@Asus:/home/Simon # cat /etc/os-release
NAME=FreeBSD
VERSION="15.0-RELEASE-p7"
VERSION_ID="15.0"
ID=freebsd
ANSI_COLOR="0;31"
PRETTY_NAME="FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE-p7"
CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:freebsd:freebsd:15.0"
HOME_URL="https://FreeBSD.org/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.FreeBSD.org/"
 
did it work after the reinstall but before restoring the backup
Yes, it worked immediately after the reinstall, but then it failed after I attempted to restore from a recent backup. I also tried to restore from a backup that was approximately one month old, but I experienced the same type of failure all over again.

Also, I think that I now I understand why I experienced the above failures following restoration from backup. I have the below line contained within a script I use to restore my backups, and until recently this method worked very well. The below line isn't my entire script, just the line which handles my packages.

Code:
pkg install $(cat /diskbkp/backup/package_list.txt)

However, I think that the problem is that above line looks at all the packages contained within package_list.txt, and then it downloads and installs them regardless of version. This must be why both FreeBSD and GhostBSD failed on me within the same day. As long as I can keep my Nvidia driver limited to, nvidia-driver-580.119.02_1, then everything is fine, but the moment it upgrades to nvidia-driver-580-580.142, then my system becomes broken. :<
 
By setting the Cinnamon specific "initialization value" into .xinitrc we are saying "Hay X Windows! I would like to run the Cinnamon desktop".
But if I were to make such a modification to my .xinitrc, would I still be able to use Xfce? At first I didn't like Xfce too much, but now that I've managed to tweak it a little bit, I'm starting to think that Xfce might be better for someone like me, than Cinnamon is. Also, I really wanted to install KDE, but I think that I read somewhere that some of the BSD distros might be ending support for it? At any rate, I now seem to have a stable installation of FreeBSD again, so I guess that I'm going to try sticking with it.
 
Well, a few days ago I thought that it was end of my adventure with FreeBSD, but now I'm happy to report that I seem to have a stable installation of FreeBSD running on my computer again, I think that I understand why my desktop failed the other day, and I think that I now have a better back up method than what I had just a few days ago. Also, I'm too lazy to replace my FreeBSD installation with Linux Mint, or Zorin, so I think that I will continue using FreeBSD for the meanwhile. Also, I learned a little bit from this incident, and I now think that if a similar incident were to happen in the future, I'm pretty sure that I could handle it without have to do a reinstall and restoring from a backup. Looks like I'm married to FreeBSD for at least the near future.
 
Well, a few days ago I thought that it was end of my adventure with FreeBSD, but now I'm happy to report that I seem to have a stable installation of FreeBSD running on my computer again, I think that I understand why [...]
Looks like I'm married to FreeBSD for at least the near future.
You made it to level 3.
Welcome to the show, buddy!
You are now an official FreeBSD user.
:cool:
 
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