apt

Ubuntu is a wonderful Linux distribution based (as are so many others) on Debian, perhaps the most stable and certainly one of the (if not the...) "freest" of all Linux distributions. While Debian's focus is stability and freedom, Ubuntu's is completeness and convenience. Both, however, use the same package management system, apt. Without getting into the issue of why apt is better than the alternatives (for the most part, anyway) let me just launch right into the subject of where packages from from: repositories.

Debian-based Linux distributions, which use the .deb package format and the apt package management system, are relatively free from dependency hell and thus are generally a joy to use and maintain. However, in order to properly manage a local archive of packages you need to build a repository in which to keep them. This is the simplest recipe I know for putting together a HTTP repository.