It has been suggested to me that the use of a chroot might solve my problem of building an application that must run on an embedded device. I have inferred from this description that it is somehow similar to creating the embedded environment locally on my machine which I can then use to develop on from my desktop development machine. Is this the right way to look at the functionality or have I totally misunderstood?

In order to get some idea of how it works I read this https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebootstrapChroot which I will attempt to make a chroot for an old Ubuntu version on my machine. However, as I am a total linux novice, I am a bit concerned that as I do not entirely know what I am doing is there anyway that I could end up with an unusable system?? Is this something that a novice should even attempt???