hello

could you please recommend me a good download accelerator for linux? preferably, a free one...

Depends on what you mean by 'download accelerator'. Most such software doesn't really do any acceleration in my experience, but is useful for managing downloads. Try finding a nice front-end to wget that you can get along with (e.g. gwget). Or just use wget alone.

i mean by accelerator something like download express for windows (i'm a newbie to linux). the way it works is as follows: instead of just one it connects to six mirrors (i think these are mirrors, well, anyway, 6 ftp's are listed) and downloads whichver part of the file it can from all of them at once. my experience is that it really does accelerate: i hardly ever got below 50 kb/s, even with files where ie wouln'd go faster then 20 or 30 kb/s; the usual rate (when downloading one file) is over 90 kb/s.
so, this is the sort of thing i'm looking for.

i use kget but as you pointed out, it just manages the downloads without actually accelerating them.