As stated above, apt-get doesn't find nano unless there is a repository I am unaware of . I am in red pill mode so that doesn't help. I did find a solution though not an especially elegant one. I found here where someone had compiled wxwidgets, perl and nano and provided it as a .tgz
I simply extracted the nano binary and copied it to /usr/bin and it seems to be working fine. It appears I am not the only one looking for this, someone really needs to port this to OS2007.
Unfortunately, I am not much of a programmer or I would try to do this myself.