The stuff I always install on a Debian box « boltblog Sitting here installing a brand new box, I look through what I use on other machines and figure out a list of things I want to have installed on any box I'm on. Here's the list so far, in no particular order: vim - my favorite text editor ssh - the secure shell server and client - a must. realpath - gets the full pathname of a given file. very useful in scripts autossh - keeps ssh connections open on its own. very useful for ssh tunnels. sysstat - various performance tools, like mpstat to see the individual cpu usage in an smp setup sudo - allows normal users to execute things as root. mind-bogglingly useful preload - tracks which applications are frequently used and tries to keep them in memory to improve startup times lshw - prints way more information about your machine than you really need sysv-rc-conf - a nice tool to set at which runlevels the machine should start and stop services console-setup -