Hi,
I want to make an environment on my development machine that's *literally* identical to my Linode VPS.

Do you have a list of installation steps taken to prepare the default OS configurations ?
For example:
Packages installed.
Configurations made.
etc ..

or better yet, do you provide VDIs (virtualbox drive images) for these default installations for people to download and run ??

You can deploy the distro, then use something like Finnix to dd+ssh this image back to your local enviroment.