Chris Lamb has a good Debian installation checklist, from which I stole most of this list. 

   1 # Configure sudo, adding my user to the sudo group so I don't get password prompts
   2 aptitude install sudo
   3 adduser xjjk sudo
   4 
   5 # Configure locales to prevent harassment about it later
   6 aptitude install locales
   7 dpkg-reconfigure -plow locales
   8 # …or install all locales so they don't need to be configured/reinstalled
   9 aptitude install locales-all
  10 
  11 # Disable installation of recommended packages
  12 echo 'APT::Install-Recommends "false";' > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/90recommends
  13 
  14 # Enable log compression with date postfix'd extension
  15 cat /etc/logrotate.conf | sed "s/#compress/compress/" > /etc/logrotate.conf.tmp
  16 echo "dateext" >> /etc/logrotate.conf.tmp
  17 mv /etc/logrotate.conf.tmp /etc/logrotate.conf
  18 
  19 # Prevent PAM from allowing easily-crackable passwords
  20 apt-get install libpam-cracklib
  21 
  22 # Install essential utilities
  23 sudo aptitude install
  24 openssh-server \
  25 atool lzma rzip xz-utils \
  26 htop dstat iotop \
  27 manpages manpages-dev \
  28 strace tcpdump lsof \
  29 moreutils \
  30 dnsutils \
  31 chrony \
  32 molly-guard
  33 
  34 # HDD Temperature/SMART monitoring utilities
  35 aptitude install hddtemp smartmontools
  36 sed -i 's/^#start_smartd=yes/start_smartd=yes/' /etc/default/smartmontools
  37 /etc/init.d/smartmontools start