6.2.4 dselect

In stable releases up to and including Potato, dselect was the principal package maintenance tool. For Sarge, you should consider using aptitude instead.

When started, dselect automatically selects all "Required", "Important", and "Standard" packages.

dselect has a somewhat strange user interface. Most people get used to it, however. It has four commands (Capital means CAPITAL!):

     Key-stroke  Action
     Q           Quit. Confirm current selection and quit anyway. 
                 (override dependencies)
     R           Revert! I did not mean it.
     D           Damn it! I do not care what dselect thinks.  Just Do it!
     U           Set all to sUggested state

With D and Q, you can select conflicting selections at your own risk. Handle these commands with care.

Add a line containing the option "expert" in /etc/dpkg/dselect.cfg to reduce noise.

If your machine runs dselect slowly then you might consider running dselect on another (faster) machine in order to determine the packages you want to install, then use apt-get install on the slow machine to install them.