Debian has introduced incremental updating of package lists. While in theory, this is a great feature, it is not always practical.

Incremental updates enable to download less data by fetching only the differences between the previous versions of the list. This results in significant savings concerning the amount of downloaded data.
The unfortunate downside is that a whole lot more fetches need to be done as each incremental update requires a server request. This becomes apparent when you don't often download package list updates, and there are suddenly a whole number of files waiting to be do  ...

If you happen to have keyboard trouble when you SSH with PuTTY to a Debian system, you might want to read on.
With trouble, I mean one or more of the following symptoms:

Numeric keypad not working, even with numlock enabled/disabledHome/End keys not working as they shouldFunction keys not working as they shouldOther weirdness concerning keyboard...We've figured out a possible solution to the problem. It has been tested (and used) extensively by my and a collegue, and have found it working perfectly on Debian Woody and Debian Sarge.
It may be possible that these settings also work on other dis  ...

Apparently, there's no package for MS-SQL support in Debian or Ubuntu. Why this is, is not very known, in particular since there is MS-SQL support in PHP4 and PHP5.
I found the following steps somewhere on the internet.

The following was tested on a Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy, but will probably work on others as well.
Also, whenever I refer to php5, it could well be replaced with php4, which I've tested as well.

First of, make sure the necessary build tools are installed:
# apt-get install build-essential debhelper

It's possible more tools are needed, depending on which ones have already been install  ...