Since the upgrade on the Purple boot screen I am getting a simple text Ubuntu 12.10 over 4 small pulsing dots
in 12.04 I was getting an image and not text- does this mean anything is wrong?
As long as your system boots and shows a GUI after this screen, you should be fine. With that said, you may not be able to access the tty's easily, so if a deep problem arises where you cannot use your graphical environment(or worse, if GRUB were to fail) then it is harder to diagnose it as the screen for GRUB prompts and the tty you can see with Ctrl+Alt+F1 may be unreadable. You can try pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 to see whether you get a readable prompt to log in, and use Ctrl+Alt+F7 to return to the GUI. If you don't, you should be warned that recovery or TTY mode may be extremely difficult to use.
In a nutshell, it won't hurt anything, but if something breaks, it may be harder to fix it.
