I think that I have met my match

[Cedric62]

"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.

 

[Cedric62]

Interesting - that sounds like Tiny Window Manager (twm) -- did it look like this? (Link): Tiny Window Manager (twm)

Yes, that was it exactly.

 

[Cedric62]

my .xinitrc file looks like this:

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?

 

[drhowarddrfine]

DO NOT enable lightdm in /etc/rc.conf until you have "startx" working. This is because until startx works -- lightdm is definitely NOT going to work

Well. Duh. Of course not. You can't run ANY window manager till X starts.

 

[claudiuschan]

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

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

List all the nvidia packages

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.

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.

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.

 

[richardtoohey2]

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?

 

[claudiuschan]

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.

 

[CShell]

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 !

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:

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

That was copied/pasted from the FreeBSD Desktop Handbook web page.

 

[CShell]

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".

 

[CShell]

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:

$ dmesg | grep GPU
nvidia0: <NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU> on ...
[drm] [nvidia-drm] ...
$

 

[CShell]

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?

 

[loveydovey]

Is this the dating thread?