Tony
That's why Wyleu thinks learing the unicode makes more sense. You're probably not working on a Linux or similar system, so your character mapping (from pressing a key to seeing something on screen) might be different. There's most likely a different way for you to type unicode characters?
Otherwise, welcome to Linux. Download a LiveCD of one of the many Linux flavours, Debian, Ubuntu, openSuse, you name it, burn it to CD, boot from CD, and try it out.

Klaus