> the make process however ended with the
> error 'aclocal-1.4' is needed, and you do not seem to have
> it handy on your system.' Since this packet is not offered
> by Debians apt, I'll have to get that somewhere else.

$ dpkg --search aclocal-1.4
automake: /usr/bin/aclocal-1.4

Then you may try:
$ apt-get install automake

(check also that you have autoconf)