[Hampshire] Dumb dpkg/aptitude question

Hi Debian/Ubuntu users,

This may be a dumb question but I can't seem to find a good answer on
my friend Google.

I have a .deb file (it's the PUEL version of VirtualBox) that I want
to install on a headless server. dpkg -i reports lots of missing
dependencies and of course dpkg can't go and resolve them from the
usual repositories. Aptitude can get things from repositories but not
install a local .deb file (or am I missing something?).

There seem to be references to double-clicking the file, but I have no
file browser (and don't want to install all the things a desktop would
need on a headless server), and gdebi but installing that would pull
in loads of GNOME stuff (which I also don't want to do).

So what is the best way to install a local deb and resolve all the
dependencies? Is there no command line tool to do both local and
repository installation?

Best I can see so far is to use dpkg -i and then run aptitude to fix
all the broken dependencies but that seems rather an ugly solution and
I am not sure what the correct sequence is.

Any suggestions?

Thanks
Rich