Okay, so I've played around with a lot of distros, including Debian, Gentoo and Ubuntu, and I've got my main system all set up to go. But when I partitioned my harddrive, I left a 10G partition just for a distro to experiment with. I've tried out openSUSE to get gfxboot up and running, and I did that and it works, but I'm not fond of it.

So, what I'm wondering is, does anybody have a suggestion of a distro/OS that's fun to play around with? I'm experiment with programming, but don't really know it. I'm not afraid of something unstable, as long as it can't hurt the other partitions on my computer or do any damage to the machine itself. I'm looking for something beyond normal linux, and I'm open to Oses other than linux (though FOSS would be good, and free of charge is a must.)

So, any suggestions of what I should install if I just want to fool around and have fun? Any Oses that are weird, unique, interesting, abnormal? fun?

Thanks!

Linux from Scratch

http://www.menuetos.net/ written in assembly language (asm) and you can learn a lot from this.

Also, do a google search for writing an OS, it's pretty interesting and fun to do too.

I suggest you ignore using a spare partition and instead use an emulator like
www.virtualbox.org

so you are only limited to the free space on your hard drive.

BTW your profile is suggests you may be in this video?
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=nuq0DvN8PYw

only joking

Yeah, the thing is, I've got the partition anyways, my processor doesn't have KVM and I find qemu, even with full kqemu enabled, to be quite slow, I don't know if virtual box would be any better...

Thank you all for the suggestions!

The other thing I might try out is an alpha/beta of a linux distro, maybe Ubuntu Jaunty or Sidux...

archlinux is fun to play with. Gets off the ground much quicker than LFS but you still learn a lot about the nuts and bolts. The thing I like most is Pacman, which is by far the quickest and easiest package manager I've ever used. Build the system you want from the foundation up (rather than pouring them yourself with LFS).

Build a distro with the ICC compiler and a toolchain w/o GNU utilities so I don't have to figure it out.

Arch is where the "supernerds" usually go after they have tried things like LFS and want something that can be used every day while still having most of the tweakability, but have a stable system that doesn't require nearly the amount of maintenance LFS would.

Arch runs on EVERY i686 compatible system I own, from my dual core Opteron server to my Atom powered netbook.

I still haven't got round to trying Arch yet, but I will do someday...honest.
The same goes for LFS.

In 2006..2007 some guys made "SEXlinux" distribution (I believe it was gentoo-based). It was meant to be a gift for a geek, and It was meant to be extremely complicated so you could spend serious amount of time making this thing work (From advertisement: "complicated installation manual will help you to install your system using longest, most uncomfortable, most complicated and least obvious way."). Two problems:
1) It was made by russians so it might have russian-only documentation (never had this distro, so I don't know for sure).
2) It is no longer available. It can't be ordered anymore, I can't find homepage and *.iso download link is broken. Distribution probably can be found through bittorrent, but right now it is probably too old to be useful (released on 1st april of 2006).
Original page is here, you can try to read it using translate.google.com.

Appropriate date?

You could try GoboLinux. Quote:
Also, you may want to explore this:
http://www.losethos.com/

Yves.

ErV
Here's one for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun
http://trinary.ru/projects/setunws/