Thanks again to Foxi for his help on IRC yesterday.
We managed to get asterisk installing without errors and without my strange workaround. Problem seems to stem from an old LMCE 10.04 install.
Steps to fix install errors:
1) perform "apt-get remove [package] --purge" for all asterisk packages
2) drop the asterisk and asteriskcdrdb databases from mysql
3) run
mysql -u root pluto_telecom -e "truncate table Line_HouseMode;"
4) apt-get install lmce-asterisk
5) run
/var/lib/dpkg/info/lmce-asterisk.postinst configure
/usr/pluto/bin/db_create_telecom_defaults.sh
6)Re-add your trunk info via webadmin.
Remaining Asterisk issues for me are:
1) Inbound calls fail and produce error: [Jan 17 09:00:39] NOTICE[27267]: chan_iax2.c:10905 socket_process: Host xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx failed to authenticate as [10 digit phone# omitted]
2) Core doesn't register it's embedded softphone. My MD does however.
3) I just noticed while testing outbound and [internal ext -> internal ext] calls that "Active Calls" in orbiter aren't showing up.