Debian is a great Linux distro, and I'm not the only person who believes this to be true. I am not willing to discuss whether Debian is better or worse than any other linux distribution as that debate will take months or longer, and there are shortcomings of Debian like any other distribution.

That said, there is an easy way to ensure your copy of Debian is kept current with the latest security patches.

1. Login as root (or more appropriately, su to the root account).

Sometimes when you're building a system, you want to be able to close the list of packages that are installed on another system.

Debian provides some great utitlities to manage their packaging system (apt, synaptic, etc). They also provide the dpkg suite of utilities as well. In this case, the command:

dpkg --get-selections

will return a list of packages that are currently installed on the system.