Serial port problems installing Misterhouse on Beaglebone Bone black

I’m installing misterhouse (http://misterhouse.sourceforge.net/) on the standard debian build (3.8.13) on a beaglebone black and struggling. Misterhouse is a Smart Home package that is written in Perl
My current problem is that during the initialization of the serial port it cannot find ttycom.ph, termbits.ph and termios.ph.
The version of Perl it needed was 5.20 as my code uses File::Copy which only came in with 5.20. I also have tried 5.14.2.
In other posts it recommends you run h2ph once you have found the .h versions of these files, unfortunately I cannot locate ttycom.h and in any case when I try to run h2ph I get an error ‘require _h2ph_pre.ph’
can anyone help?
Would using the ubuntu build be better?
Thanks