It's handy to install it onto a real machine if the machine in question is a gutless wonder of an old laptop that doesn't really do virtualization.
But in any case, as noted, if you're running a Debian-related linux it's relatively trivial to install it just by running a script. I had to manually tweak a grand total of *one* thing to get it going on a vanilla Debian install. (The default config for some reason didn't actually turn on the kernel Appletalk support so it came up only speaking Appletalk-over-IP.)