D can do most of what C can, including writing bare metal code (without an operating system) with minimal runtime library requirements. While most D libraries (including the Phobos standard library) will not work in such a minimal environment, we can still use the majority of the core language if we opt for enough library support.
Running experimental bare metal programs on physical hardware is a slow and time consuming process. Instead, I recommend that you set up an emulator or virtual machine. In this book, we'll use QEMU; this may be available in your Linux distribution's package manager, or you can build it from a source by downloading the code from http://qemu.org/. We'll also use Linux to build the application. To follow along, you'll need a Linux computer with the DMD compiler installed.