Is there a way to determine

[Douglas Phillipson <dougp@intermind.net>]

Sorry for the newbie question.  I'm new to the Debian package management 
system.  Is there a way to determine what packages are available from 
the repositories I have in sources.list?  I use dpkg --list to see 
what's installed, but is there a way to see what packages are available, 
but not installed?  I tried dpkg --update-avail * but nothing seems to 
happen.  I'd like to see what kernel packages are available, I tried
dpkg --update-avail kern* then dpkg --list but only see the kernel stuff 
already installed.  What am I missing???

Thanks for any help...

DSP