Use virtualbox, create a small Linux VM, and run it alongside whatever else you've got on your machine. Its simple enough that its sort of a duh - if you were

Use virtualbox, create a small Linux VM, and run it alongside whatever else you've got on your machine. Its simple enough that its sort of a duh - if you were really interested, you could get the VM and bootable Linux dev environment running in less than an hour. I'd be surprised if it took you 20 minutes to look at this stack, build and compile, and learn about it that way...