After a couple of years of inactivity I needed again my Neon installation, so as first activity I updated the whole thing using Discover, updating something such as 1200 items.


Problems is after the update the instance it's not booting anymore, providing only a blinking cursor on empty screen.

Using grub options I was able to start a previous kernel release in safe graphics mode, but this didn't help me in getting back to my original installation.


The original update was getting an error in updating "akonady-contacts-data" and "libkf5calendarcore5" libraries, stating "you have no authorization to execute this operation". Not sure if there lie the problem, to me seems not important features. But maybe point to more deep problems in some authorization changed in the update process.



There is any recovery process I can be pointed at, or will be better to whipe up and start from scratch. Not my preferred option since I got a lot of tools installed on Neon and will need them for future reference.

Very likely you installed a proprietary and optional NVidia driver set that was not upgraded, or was not upgraded properly. I would run the uninstallation process[1] for that driver and try booting. You should be able to do this via command line tools by booting after striking E at the Grub menu and appending a 3 to the line that starts linu before proceeding with boot. An alternative may be to append nomodeset instead of 3 to the linu line, thus booting to a low resolution mode to attempt NVidia driver update. Another alternative to perform NVidia update might be to boot using the old kernel option in the Grub menu.

[1] The uninstallation instructions should be part of the instructions that accompany the driver.

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I tried to follow your instructions but either I'm too uneperienced to do the right thing or the system was too damaged but I always ended with a core dump error, without being able to access any Neon installation anymore.
in the end I just cleaned out the disk and reinstalled Neon, after two year of no usage there was nothing really relevant inside.