In a great favour to humanity the SDF Public Access Unix System is a project founded in 1987 that provides free shell accounts to a Unix system for use by the public for testing, code compilation or just honing your unix skills.
If you relish the days of university where you could write your own scripts, miss IRC in full 2 colour glory or just want SSH access from work or on the road consider signing up for an account.
For free you can get an acount with a choice of shell and webspace, or for a small donation of $36 you can get lifetime access to extended disc space and many UNIX programs such as IRC, Python, Perl, Ruby or the C compiler without all the mucking around of setting up your own *ix variant.
For more information telnet "sdf.lonestar.org" and login "New"; after account creation you can access via SSH.
http://sdf.lonestar.org/ for more info
