For my future debian setups I'd like to use a common file containing lists of packages and commands to run after initial VPS creation ( I use linode ).
Could anyone advise what I could setup in order to accomplish this? I would want to throw in commands such as aptitude update and then aptitude install screen and dozens and dozens of packages to download.
One way to deal with this would be to create a script (bash would be appropriate) that runs your various commands. In fact the script would be incredibly short if it read in the package names from another file.
The only problem would be if package names changed and you didn't notice/update the name in your script or file.