That's very strange, right? It would seem to mean that Gavin's repo's Makefile is broken, or that he's using a different distribution than you. But Ubuntu uses the same package names as debian, which I think is pretty standard. Oftentimes, Makefiles get generated by ./configure or ./autoconf.sh. Did you run ./configure or ./autoconf after installing libboost?
In the repo, he said "I don't do autotools" and that he was using OS X. The project is pretty minimal so I don't expect lots of handholding in making it easy to run. It turned out not too be that hard.
I find C++ with templating and boost pretty cumbersome to read and I may do a sim in python just so it's easier to explore some of the details. Overall I think his is pretty decent...perhaps being able to explore less reliability in network links, getting into some sort of mempool and fee modeling with some miners making smaller blocks, would be enough incentive to get started on a sim.
Cool, using OSX explains the difference in package names. For some reason, I had just assumed that all of the C++ code from the "serious" developers would be targeting GNU/Linux. 'scuse me. --TSP