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If anybody is doing this, let me share some words of advice based on experience.

Please use a virtual machine instead of doing this on your primary machine. You eliminate the risk of messing up your machine. Also, if you setup the VM properly, you get a debugger.

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It's still important to test on physical hardware though, perhaps on an old spare machine you don't care about if you want to be cautious, as the virtual machines do not perfectly emulate real hardware. For example, QEMU initializes memory to all zeroes, whereas on a real system it's typically all ones, which led to some interesting bugs in my OS on real hardware where I had forgotten to zero out some memory.

Could you point to how to go about setting a suitable VM up on Debian? I could do with not bricking my machine :)

Use QEMU.

http://qemu.weilnetz.de/qemu-doc.html

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