interesting work. i use smart on my fedora box. what is it that is not working on the install side? AFAIK, smart does support .deb packages and debian repos. whats really nice is that (when smart works )you can select multiple packages for install, and the downloading of the packages is threaded, thereby making the whole process that much faster. a couple of smart command line options that are not in the help files: smart config --show - will show the config for smart smart config --set http-proxy=http://server.domain.com:<port> - sets a proxy for smart to go through