Have you thought about making yourself a Virtual Machine to test stuff like this in? It is actually a very nice way to "muck about" without destroying anything. If you use VMWare Workstation (payware), you can also make "Snapshots" of your machine and revert it to the previous state as you work on it, very nice if you really do nasty stuff...
There are some free ones out there also, Xen being the one getting the most attention these days, after they were bought by Citrix. The product is still free, but limited in some aspects to VmWare.
I have also seen instructions somewhere on how to make VMWare machines for free, using Xen (I think) to make a VMWare Disk/Machine, and starting it in VMWare Player (free) to get access to the other functions VMWare have to offer.
I would highly recommend this approach as compared to changing the software running on your production computer. As an added bonus, you can run Windows on top of your Linux box....