Installed Mint Cassandra,working well, tried installing desk applet. When computer restarted Gnome desktop option disappeared. Failsafe gnome option tells me cant find gnome. Tried reinstalling/uninstalling several times. Any ideas appreciated.

how about just trying "apt-get install gnome" ?

dunno anything about Mint so I'll presume that you'd still have to log in and install it as root.

I'm guessing that something you did before must have uninstalled the original version of gnome.

Or failing that, you can try the "tried and tested" windowsesque way of repairing the system. Re-install the whole of the OS, just bang the disc in the drive and boot it. select the default setting unless theres anything specific you want to save (erm, that'd also be presuming that your original partitioning scheme has a seperate /home partition and if so, just tell it to use the existing partitions, but deselect the format option for the /home.

regards

John

Thanks John. Had tried that to no avail. Using synaptic I removed all gnome desktop related stuff, and then tried a reinstall. Back in business. Am new to linux, and had got familiar with, and to like KDE, while gnome was broken. To be fair to windows, I've used it for 12 years without having to reinstall. System restore would have sorted a similiar problem , and usually a google search will point me in the right direction.