I recently got my N800 and I'm learning about adding software, and the repositories. I opened a command console and looked to see what was in /etc/apt/sources.list. To my surprise that file is empty. Doesn't Nokia use source.list to keep a list of the repositories?

/etc/apt/sources.list.d

Look in that directory.

it's snapshot, but it is not storage. Storage in gconf

Thanks GeneralAntilles,

I don't have the bluetooth keyboard so I first added openssh. Now I can ssh in from my desktop, that makes my explorations much easier! Anyway, I got in there and found a file named "hildon-application-manager.list" which contains the lines below.

deb http://catalogue.tableteer.nokia.com/certified/ chinook user
deb http://catalogue.tableteer.nokia.com/non-certified/ chinook user
deb http://catalogue.tableteer.nokia.com/updates/chinook/ ./
deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras/ chinook free non-free
deb http://repository.maemo.org/ chinook free non-free
deb http://packages.gizmoproject.com/chinook chinook user

I am not sure what you mean by that.
When I did
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

I found the downloaded packages were placed into /var/cache/apt/archives/ as in a typical system using the apt-get package manager.