SATA newbie questions

[Kevin Kempter]

Hi List;

I'm new to Kubuntu, Ubuntu and any other debian based distro. I am not new to 
Linux - up until now I've only run RPM based distros.

One issue with running Fedora on my laptop was that I had performance issues 
with my SATA hard drive. The fix was to add this to the grub kernel line:
"combined_mode=libata"

However doing this causes issues with mounting my cd's / dvd's and automount 
stopped working completely.

Is this an issue with Kubuntu as well?

Also, two more questions:
(1) can someone point me to a link with info on how to install debian packages 
by hand ?

(2) can I search on what packages/versions are currently installed (like an 
rpm -qa) ? 


Thanks in advance...