G'day all, a few questions

[kracker at dull.name]

Hey,

I'm absolutely loving Ubuntu at the moment and will probably switch over
from Slack as my main desktop OS.  Thanks very much for such a great
product! I have a few questions if that's ok :)

1) Is it possible to save the .deb packages that are used to install the
base system when it downloads them from the internet during the install. 
I'm not blessed with an incredibly fast pipe and I want to install it on
both my laptop and my desktop, so having the packages locally after one
download would be great.

2) Will running apt-get update && apt-get upgrade (or dist-upgrade) (or
using Synaptic) keep me up to date with the latest version of Ubuntu.  I
mean, when you release, for example, 5.10 or whatever the next release
after 4.10 final is called, will running those commands update my kernel,
x11, programs etc. to  the ones included in that version.. and will there
be updates to the programs as time goes on between releases.  I.e. if, for
example, Gnome 2.8.1 is released during the "life" of Ubuntu 4.10 will
that appear in the repositorys?

Thanks for your time, kudos to the team for making a Linux distro that the
community can be proud of from the beginning!