Debian Questions on apt-get

[Matt <lm7812@gmail.com>]

I have worked with Centos quite a bit in past though no expert.
Giving Debian a whirl now.

Installed Debian on a 1U box.  Used a 1TB drive and EXT4.  Linux
debian 2.6.32-5-amd64

root@debian:~# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             916G  661M  868G   1% /
tmpfs                 497M     0  497M   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                  493M  112K  493M   1% /dev
tmpfs                 497M     0  497M   0% /dev/shm

Unchecked all options when installing since I wanted only essentials
since this will be a rack mount server.  After I installed I found ssh
was not installed.

In Centos when I want to update or add a package I do this:

yum update

or:

yum install package_name

To find a package I also frequently do something like this:

yum list available |grep abr_package_name

To get ssh going I finally did this from console:

apt-get install openssh-server

It demanded I plug the USB CD-ROM back in.  Now I have SSH running and
can eliminate the keyboard and monitor.

After getting ssh installed I edited /etc/apt/sources.list and
commented out the CD to get it to quit asking for the USB drive which
will not remain on the system.

Now on Centos when I do 'yum update' after a fresh install I usually
get offered a good number of patches etc.  When I do 'apt-get update'
I seem to get nothing.

So are there really no patches available or am I doing something
wrong?  How do I get it too download and install new packages with
apt-get or whatever rather then using the CD?

Is there a FAQ or something out there for users coming from CentOS to Debian?

Thanks.