I guess it depend where you bought your laptop. I have a US TiBook3 and the ~ is just below the ESC small key and need the Shift modifier. I am not sure to understand why you need this key to start. But if this is to type the URL of my page that you seems to mention, you can forget the tilde: http://cattlegrid.net/christophe/titanium/
well, yeah, its your page, but i need it to edit in the /etc/apt/sources.list
i'll try Eric's keybord...by the way, I don't get this kernel stuff working, i found out that I have to install rsync, but the "make menuconfig" does't work.
Is there anywhere a DUMMY manual out there that might help me...? Cheers benjamin