I'm aware work is proceeding to get salt into Debian. However, if someone wants to simply install salt via pip or directly from the repository, the following configuration might be helpful on systems that support upstart (e.g. ubuntu).

https://gist.github.com/1617054

It's the first hit on google search "salt minion upstart", but if there's an appropriate place in the salt repo for this configuration file, feel free to add it.