Re: Real newbee question (CVS) and last stable version.
Try grabbing the 1.8.1 tarball from SourceForge, its much better and lots of bugfixes ReleaseProcess181 😀
CVS is a Code versioning system, allowing many developers to work on 1 project. HowToDev I think has details.
Let us know how you get on with 1.8.1 and btw 1.8.2 is just around the corner 😉