Just to round this one out, I was able to get things working in a Fedora29 VM by relying on Substitutes. I found the 'Binary Installation' docs to be somewhat misleading but I wrote a BASH script (wrapped in a Vagrantfile) which details my working setup. I'm not sure its worth sharing here since it relies on VirtualBox which has some non-free aspects to its licensing.
If there's any interest in the above then I'll spend some time converting it to use KVM and then share here. Thanks for the help, Ricardo.
