I installed 12.10 on my 11-inch mid-'11 Air without a hitch. I removed Unity and installed Cinnamon in its place. I purged every Unity-related package from the system. Today, the kernel updated and broke my machine. I can't get to the GRUB menu and I am told that the computer is running in low-graphics mode, even though I can't do anything with the options presented by the dialogues. nmcli refuses to connect to my network. I need a way to get the system working again, preferably without using a reinstall or install disk.
lspci -nn | grep VGA
produces:
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corp. 2nd Gen. Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:0116] (rev 09)
A Happy Update!
Turns out my problem was I never ran update-grub. So right now, I'm rebooting with Unity installed again to see if it makes a difference.
A Happier Update
The problem now seems to lie with the new kernel. It won't recognize my wireless card. But this problem can be considered closed, methinks.