So,

I have a Sony Vaio sve15118fg running Ubuntu 12.10 which comes with an AMD Radeon™ HD 7650M graphics chip.

This was all working fine until some updates (note sure what they were) came through, after installing my laptop now no longer boots properly, specifically:

• Upon attempting to boot the screen starts flicking violent striped horizontal lines. This can only be corrected via the power button.
• Attempting to do anything in recovery - bar dropping to a root shell - runs fsck which ends up hanging (although the system still responds there is no HDD activity). This is remedied via Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart the system.
• Running fsck manually from the root shell completes successfully.

I have attempted numerous things including removing all propriety drivers, Trying the two installed propriety drivers, installing the latest beta driver from AMD. etc.

These all yeild various results, such as the same as above, or a gnome-fallback session, or a gnome-shell session with various flickers and graphical artifacts.

So, I am wondering, what the heck do I have to do to get this to work?!? I don't really game, especially in ubuntu, so I just want a working system! not fussed about 3d acceleration of whatever...