Hi, are you still doing this?  If you are I would be happy to help with that stuff.  I got over that initial hurdle.  The biggest difficulty I had was what to search for on Google and then mining after finding a genesis block.  I had connection issues with my nodes.  I would recommend going from abc coin and using shakezula's guides.  You will need the scrypt guide as well as the Bitcoin cloning guide if you want to clone an earlier Bitcoin, because it goes into the details of commands for P2P things.  I banged my head on the wall for a while until I went back to the guide and remembered "-connect".  Sometimes it's the smaller things that are a trip up!

Anyway, have you got most of your Linux environment set up?  You will need two machines to connect.  I wouldn't recommend having one inside a virtual machine to begin with, like Linux in VirtualBox.  But you can do it over a couple of old laptops or desktops on the local net instead of using a VPS as a more permanent seed node.  The starting difficulty is a very high number to begin with, making it easy to generate new coins for an altcoin project and see it in action.

Good luck.