Packaging applications for Debian 

This article was first written in December 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/313).
To do the best use of Debian's superior package management system (APT), the application must be packaged, in the form of one or several .deb files. Packaging has many, many advantages, you just couldn't believe. As Debian is all about Free Software, it is clear that the preferred source for a package be the upstream source package. That way, submitting patches upstream is as simple as possible as they are naturally available to the World.

HOWTO Keep a network of Debians up-to-date 

This article was first written in August 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/289).
Due to the unrivaled apt tools, Debian is probably the easiest GNU/Linux distribution to keep up-to-date, at least when you have a fast Internet connection. In a network of many machines, the goal is slightly different though: you probably want to take as little bandwidth as possible away from users.

cron-apt

The first part of the solution, and the easiest to setup, is to install package cron-apt which will download the packages

HOWTO Clean packages on a Debian system 

This article was first written in July 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/282).
A Debian system can take more and more disk space as you install new packages. Let's see how we can detect which packages are no longer used (unsused/obsolete/transitional) and clean them if we are sure we don't need them anymore. First, it is good to know that when you use apt (apt-get, aptitude, dselect, synaptic, ...) the files downloaded are stored in /var/cache/apt/archives, and never cleaned.
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