wheres the freakin ~ button under Debian Linux?

Depends on your keyboard layout / language settings. You might want to give xkeycaps a try.
http://www.jwz.org/xkeycaps/

many thanks for that, and sorry i took so long to reply. I wanted to wait untill i became a little more confident installing applications in linux before I attempted to install this little ditty.

Well, after successfuly manually installling nonfree-flash (I just wish Gnash was as efficient and compatible) and wormux, I decided to tackle this bad boy. unfortunately i fell at the first hurdle.

$ xmkmf

... wasn't happy. something about the stdin.h and other stuff. But I presume it's just my ill-equipped distibution, since it doesn't come with any of the development tools like gcc.