Debian

In debian install-recommends defaults to "true", which means that you will get all sorts of unnecessary extra packages when installing software

Check the settings with apt-config dump

To circumvent this, put this in a file in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/

APT::Install-Recommends "false";

Debian 6 & postgresql

In debian 6.0 psql is linked to the lesser developed libedit instead of libreadline, see this or this

It can be bypassed by launching psql like this:

LD_PRELOAD=/lib/libreadline.so.6 psql

or wait until postgresql-common v114 gets accepted into stable

Debian 6 && nonfree

In debian 6 they changed policy about nonfree firmware blobs in kernels - and all those were moved to packages in non-free. In order to get full support for my realtek card(!) i need to

apt-get install firmware-realtek
update-initramfs -u

Debian 7 & ia32-libs

in order to install ia32-libs on a multiarch (amd64) deb7, you must first add i368 to the list of supportet architectures:

dpkg --add-architecture i386