Today I searched for a way to delete orphaned packages on my Ubuntu box and stumbled upon a nice explanation for the apt-get program available on most Debian and Ubuntu distros. Thanks to ubuntuusers.de (german).

Here is how to get rid of orphaned packages with Edgy Eft (6.10) or higher:
$ sudo apt-get autoremove
But what I also found is this nice little command. It allows you to install a bunch of packages listed in a text file. That comes very handy if you want to set up a BOINC server. Just copy the package list for Debian 4.0 to a text file on your Linux box called packages.list and run this comand in a shell:
$ cat packages.list | sudo xargs apt-get -y install