Ok heres my story, if you don't care skip to the bottom part.

backgroung:
I started using linux about a year ago, and chose Red Hat 9 as my first distro, because i heard it was a good distro for linux newbies. Looking back on that decision, i relize it was a mistake because red hat "holds your hand" too much and doesn't require you to learn much about linux to use it (all the graphical utillities).

I recently decided to move to a more advanced distro which you actually had to have some knowledge in order to use and would be a challange and i narrowed my choices to slackware, debian, and gentoo. I eventully chose debian.

Since I have 56k just downloading the latest unstable iso's from ftp was not an option, so i went to eBay to look for linux cd's like i did when i got RedHat9. I was unplesantly supprised to find that the only cd's on sale on ebay were rather old debian woody disk which had older versions that the redhat disk i already had.

When i came accross the knoppix disk, it seemed like a good idea becuase i was wanting a live linux disk and it was based on debian. My new goal was to perform a hdd instalation of knoppix and totally convert it to debian (since the knoppix disk had alot more recent software i.e. kernel 2.4 + 2.6 and kde 3.2), plus i thought the process of the conversion would be a good learning experience.

I have had some luck. I got my winmodem to work, got my ATI 9600XT drivers installed after some fiddling, and am able to placy ut2004 (ableit ALOT slower than on windows). Now i am ready to remove all traces of knoppix that i no longer need.

..........

heres the question:
in my efforts to convert the knoppix hdd install to debian (keep in mind im on 56k so heavy downloading is not an option) i have run across the heavily modifed /init.d scripts. I would like to replace them with the standard debian scripts and would like to know where i can find them and the easiest way to replace them.

Also, i am trying to upgrade as many packages as possible and i would lke to know which ones are the most useful and most important to update from a security standpoint.