Comment 720 for bug 993187

A 3.8 kernel did not appear to be compatible with 12.04.1... Although it booted to the login screen there was:
  (1) No grub menu, (2) No boot screen just purple, (3) When plugging in a USB keyboard (none connected initially), nothing happens, (4) No network. I had to boot into rescue media and restore the previous Kernel 3.5.

This comment is just in case anyone else having graphics stability problems over the past 1-2 months is following this same path I am, on a quest to restore desktop stability with an AMD/radeon chipset.

I just installed some new bugfixes to the 3.5 kernel from proposed. There are a few radeon bugfixes listed in the changelog. I Fingers crossed.

This may be my last post on this bug, as it has been marked as (yet another) "Won't Fix".

This past 6 months has been very poor for stability of both for my Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Desktop installations.
Then there is 12.10, which I downgraded immediately to 12.04 upon encountering the Amazon lens, several software crashes and other gems.

I can't get through a single working day without some form of Ubuntu crash. Yet my laptop at home is stable.

I think it's time to review "Won't Fix" policy. Yes, this bug has become a hodge-podge. It is also High + Critical severity and a serious stability issue. I would never close a serious system usability bug like this as "Won't Fix".

I bet many of the 428 users who have marked themselves as affected by this bug would be willing to run whatever diagnostic steps the developers need.

The reason why many posts are so vague could be because this is an unrecoverable random crash, which leaves no logs to post.