getting CVS version of Blender... how to?

I’m sure this has been covered before in some posts here but a search isn’t coming up with much.

How do I go about getting the up-to-the-minute version of blender out there to check out those nifty new features for 2.40 everyone is talking about?

Do you simply log in via CVS, download it and then you have to compile? Is there some compile guide? Any pointers?

You can get precompiled CVS here :
http://blender.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=18&sid=72c4ccf902f5013ce658a9317bf1fea6

Building Blender from scratch:
http://www.southanuk.co.uk/~theappleman/index.html
Takes a while, but is really simple, and you don’t have to wait for someone to build for you (although that’s rarely a problem)