I've installed Debian Squeeze on a spare partition on a family computer. I won't however have access to the computer for months at a time so I have set security updates to be installed without prompting. I assume the updates will install even though the only user logging in will be non-admin? Will there be any notification of updates being installed or is it silent?

For me, in the past it has been silent because I made a script to run apt-get update && apt-get -y dist-upgrade that is run from a root cron job. Make sure that the sources.list is set to "squeeze" as opposed to "stable" so you don't run into problems when Wheezy is released in a couple of years.

Additionally, I would make sure their home network is configured so you can ssh in from outside and fix things (use screen for sessions that will be disconnected). I have several services setup (Mythtv for one) that break whenever certain packages get updated. They're easy to fix (resetting the mysql user password), but it seems to fail every time mysql gets a patch.

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I'll check the sources.list as you suggest. I'll have to leave the dist-upgrade and ssh I think as it is actually abroad on a flaky connection, but thank you for your suggestions, very helpful.