Specific Debian install questions for the Central

I'm on a mission. I want simple things like 'more' to work, and I'd love to get a telnet daemon to start with.

I saw that more didn't like the fact that libncurses.so.5 wasn't installed, so I got the libncurses5_5.2.20020112a-7_i386.deb package. I looked around for installation options...
apt-get? Nope
dpkg? Nope
dselect? Nope

If these utilities aren't on the machine, how would one install a package? How do you install a package installer? Chicken / egg

Thanks,
Chris

http://www.differentpla.net/~roger/empeg/car/cloning.html has a section on unpacking .deb files.