Ubuntu – How to install the latest version of Sphinx Seach in Apt-get

Add the testing repos to your sources.list:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian testing main contrib

Now do 'apt-get install gcc-4.4' ; it turns out that 4.4 is packaged so it can be installed alongside the straight 'gcc' package.

The apt history is in /var/log/apt/history.log as said in a comment above. That said, this will not list packages that were installed manually, using dpkg or GUIs such as gdebi. To see all the packages that went through dpkg, you can look at /var/log/dpkg.log.