I Have finally managed to get Boost to install after copious amounts of time spent. As a bit of a newbie to Boost I was totally lost. At the point of >bjam install I would get a heap of errors. after having to ctrl-c to stop the scrolling text to find what was causing it. I found there was a problem with bzip2.
Running on Debian with Bzip installed I thought it should be working. but NO, it wasn't. Apparently it was missing a file bzlib.h which comes with bzip2-devel. that that is not at all obvious when looking at the errors. I checked it out to find that it was actually installed. so I removed it and installed it again. It came up with a dependency that was not installed.
Now it works.
Hope that helps anyone else in the future cause it sure was a pain for me.
:o) Phil