Hi wpfundstein,
I have not yet tried to install Asterisk on Debian, but if you have the apt-get command in your distribution I believe it will work. You can check if you have it by running the command apt-get -v in the command line, this will display the version of apt-get you have. In the following link there is a tutorial on how to install Asterisk including the dependencies required http://voipfreak.net/how-to-install-asterisk-on-debian. Let me know if this works for you.
Regards,
Sergio