Tons of ????!!

If I’m suppose to be able to access the .htaccess file so one can see the blog and not the file index, how does one do that when it says in the tutorial that Unix & Linux servers “hide” these files? My ftp sw doesn’t see it either. I even tried on the admin side under, “manage, files” and it says the .htaccess file doesn’t exist. How do you create one?
Second, I can click on the index.php file and bring up the opening page but all the links like, “home” and “about” take me right back to the file index. How does one fix that?