Ok i would like to dual boot the most unix like distro on my laptop (inspiron 1525). I would like to have no gui so i get used to the console etc but i guess being able to boot a gui if i'm desperate (prefer gnome). Thanks everyone.

What do you mean by 'most unix like'? If you want a flavour of Unix, why not install that instead? Solaris x86, or FreeBSD, or NetBSD, ... etc.

I did consider that I just wasn't sure whether it would be safer to go with linux or pure unix. FreeBSD atm is my primary choice.

atm - did you mean at the most ?

there are numerous expansions to atm

Please read the rules of the forum - No cyber chat styles

If you didn't mean that, am sorry and I will take it back

Oooops sorry was in the office and in a hurry. I meant at the moment.

I recommend Slackware as a Linux distro. It is the most teaching distro, as you'll need to do everything yourself, thus it is a very humbling experience. It comes with X windows, running KDE (Slack does not believe in Gnome, but you can compile it yourself, no problem with that)

FreeBSD will be a walk in the park after Slackware. You'll hit the ground running after Slack in any *nix. I just hope you do not end up like me; reading unix . com for 2 hour daily, but replying only once a month.

Good luck.

If you want to experience the real Unix feeling
then I would advise to pick one of the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD)
because they originally derived from the ancestoral AT&T/BSD Unix code
(though completely rewritten by now for legal issues).
But at the command line and the way of how administrative work is done
that is pretty close to, well Unix
(of course today there are plenty of Unices, also there used to be a more remarkable
divide between BSD vs. SysV style which today somewhat has leveled out)

If you however would like to stick to a Linux distro
(because of the far larger developers' base the support for newer HW still is usually better, but on the other hand maybe also buggier?)
then pick up one of the hard core distros like LFS (Linux from Scratch),
Gentoo, Arch, Slackware (and skip the installation of X )