If you’re using nano to edit your files (as this tutorial suggests), then ctrl+x (Exit) includes WriteOut (ctrl+o) for any file with changes. You don’t need to go through both steps.

or just ‘sudo aptitude install alias’ and ‘alias c=”apt-cache show”‘
before the tutorials, but the bashrc makes it permanent

I use it all the time. Granted, lots of tricksy little keyboard shortcuts to get used to, but the built-in help always saves me.

Oh, and something that seems to get lost in the noise, but Ubuntu is fundamentally built on top of Debian. So it’s not really an “either/or” scenario between those two. Ubuntu’s package management (which is 50% of what really defines and differentiates one distro from another anwyay), the apt toolset, is actually Debian.

What mainly differentiates Ubuntu is their fixed release schedule (every three months or whatever, I don’t recall exactly), which means you can count on package updates (with shiny new features!) on a regular basis. Debian prefers the “we’ll release a new version when it’s damn good and ready” approach, which people like when they want absolute package stability (excepting security updates, of course, which Debian does well and regularly).

Oh, and speaking of “stability”, it doesn’t mean what most people think it means, which is to say, your server crashing. A functional Ubuntu server is just as “crash-proof” as a functional Debian server. Or at least, on the same order of magnitude, which is in and of itself several of orders better than any NT box you might have lying around.

The definition of stable they operate under is package stability. Debian folks want to have the server run for years at a time, untouched and uninterrupted except for routinely flawless security patches. By contrast, following the Ubuntu curve means you’ll get new package versions semi-regularly, which might require you to tweak your setup (new configs, new features to disable, what have you) from time to time, along with the rare possibility that you run into package version/dependency conflicts that require some amount of troubleshooting (which, usually, means googling it to find out how the smart people fixed it already). To be honest, I’ve never had that happen, even when running Ubuntu or Debian “unstable”, unless I did it to myself.

One other big difference is that Ubuntu comes with nice default packages for a fully functional desktop X-window setup. I don’t think Debian has anything comparable at the moment (the packages are there, you just have to hand-pick them), though for server stuff it obviously tends not to matter.