I run Sarge on an openz vps with strictly allocated 64MB RAM. apt-get upgrade will fall over with dpkg malloc errors. So instead I have a script which effectively does: apt-get update apt-get upgrade --download-only -y dpkg -Ri /var/cache/apt/archives/ apt-get clean So far this has always worked, whereas plain 'apt-get upgrade' will not. Packages can be installed using a similar method.