Originally Posted by Corona688

Install it on its own system, don't try and dual-boot -- if that goes sour you could lose everything. You don't have to put it on a "good" system, even a junk PIII makes a good home-server if it has enough ram(512M or more). Then seriously use it. Do things like try to set up a file server, web server, get ssh going, and so forth. You may need to learn some basics first, like how UNIX manages file ownership and permissions and how partitions work in UNIX; these features at base are nearly the same everywhere, even if some have extended features like access control lists too.

You could also try and find an old HP-UX based system on Ebay. Sometimes you can get old hardware for a song. There's a few kinds of BSD actually, and openBeOS, but close enough. General-purpose commands will be nearly the same. They'll both have commands proscribed by POSIX like cp, mv, echo, and so forth, and they'll all have some variety of Bourne shell available. System configuration will be very different from OS to OS though. Also, different shells have different capabilities, but if you avoid features that aren't strictly Bourne shell features, like arrays, you should be able to write shell scripts that work in most shells. If you need these advanced features, the korn shell is more widely available than bash on most non-Linux systems. At core nearly any UNIX system can be operated almost exclusively from the commandline -- even the heavily-GUI based Macintosh OSX. Most any UNIX can have some sort of GUI available, but this is frequently optional.