I have spent the better part of the afternoon trying to install from a .deb, add the repos to my sources and install with aptitude and finally installing via git+python and none of them result in a working odoo server.

Installing via apt-get or the .deb file will install fine but odoo will not start and there are no logs or output that really gives much of a clue why

Trying to install from git results in this:

error: pathspec 'master' did not match any file(s) known to git.
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 162, in <module>
  File "<stdin>", line 154, in main
  File "<stdin>", line 144, in cmd_setup
  File "<stdin>", line 95, in cmd_setup_git
  File "<stdin>", line 39, in run
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 540, in check_call
    raise CalledProcessError(retcode, cmd)
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '('git', 'checkout', 'master')' returned non-zero exit status 1

I have upgraded python to 2.7.8 which I thought might have been causing some of this but still nothing is working.  Is there any way to get Odoo 8 installed on this system?

thanks