Under Debian, you have multiple libboost development libraries-the basic one, iostreams, and a bunch of others.
The configure script detects the presence or absence of libboost-dev, but not libboost-iostreams-dev, which is necessary for a successful build.
This is unfortunate. Aleph One doesn't use the linked components of the iostream library, it only uses the headers. Because libboost-iostreams-dev would depend on libboost-iostreams, the headers that don't require the linked library should be included in libboost-dev. That way applications such as Aleph One would not require the additional package install. I don't understand why Debian even bothers to split boost into pieces if you're just going to have to install them all anyway.
I could add a check for boost iostreams to configure.ac, but that would then require the installation of the linked iostreams library even on sane distributions. So, I'm not sure how to proceed. Perhaps it is sufficient to add a Debian-specific note to the install guide mentioning this requirement.