You should update your .htaccess now!! Help Needed!

I just got that message in the admin of a WP blog I've just installed.

And all I was doing was choosing my permalinks.

In fact there were 2 messages - the first one said "If your .htaccess file were writable, we could do this automatically, but it isn’t so these are the mod_rewrite rules you should have in your .htaccess file. Click in the field and press CTRL + a to select all."

Ok well I certainly don't want to mess with tech stuff like htaccess files and I've not had to before.

So to make my htaccess file writeable what attributes does it need. I can see it in my ftp and if I do a chmod I need to know what numbers to type in.

e.g. 744 or whatever...

Thanks in advance!

:-)

Alex