Work on a Linux system that uses systemd? You have systemd-nspawn, which is a cool feature I recently found out about. It lets you manage containers for development very easily (I'm using it to manage a Debian container from my Arch install for packaging purposes). Here's the steps necessary to make and boot a Debian container[1]: debootstrap --arch=amd64 jessie debian/
sudo systemd-boot -D debian/ /usr/bin/passwd -d root
sudo systemd-boot -bD debian
Then you can log in as root on your full blown Debian system. Hope you find this useful![1] Assuming you already have debootstrap installed - https://wiki.debian.org/Debootstrap