Apt NHF

“One of the reasons that Debian is such a cool and intuitive distribution is because of it’s packaging system (*.deb). The installation uses a program called apt to download and install programs from cds, nfs, ftp, or http. Because of this, you can install an entirely current system from an old installation cd. The most remarkable thing about apt, however, is that it checks and maintains dependencies for you, so you do not need to go around hunting for libraries that you need before installing your favorite programs.”
Check it out at Linuxnewbie.org–Sensei