i m frustrated. i ve installed fc2 3 times. fc2 runs smooth after installation, but, everytime, once after a week of time, the system wont start up and halt before the the mesg "Welcome to Fedora Core 2".

i m considering to use sth other distro. how to compare debian & freebsd with fc2? i havent tried distro other than fc2. i choose fc2 at first coz it is said that it is said easier to use (with rpm) and a better int'l language support (it's my major concern).

Try mandrake and use the reiserfs. I've found reiserfs much more resilient than ext3 which fc-2 uses by default especially if you have a hard shutdown.

i heard that mdk also has a pretty desktop

debian and freebsd are famous too. may i add further, what are the characteristics of these 2 distro?

Yes, Mandrake has a pretty desktop, plenty of international support, works great on reiserfs, better hardware support then FC2, and I personally like the installation/update ability it has through urpmi. I don't know much about yum, which is what FC2 uses for RPM installs, but I like urpmi better. After you add a couple FTP mirrors, I haven't been able to find a piece of software that I needed and couldn't get just by typing urpmi <whatever you want>. Try it and see if it works for you.

about the whole comparison of debian and/or *bsd to FC2, if you are not very experienced with linux, you probably don't want to try debian. And you certainly do not want to try *bsd if you are a newbie. FreeBSD doesn't use binaries (i.e. RPMs), so you have to install everything from source, which is very messy, and difficult to grasp if you're used to doing everything in the GUI. I'd stick with something easier to use, like Mandrake. Build a test box or something if you really want to try the other two.