Photoshop Help?

I downloaded a trial version of Photoshop (I'm very much used to PSP, and I wanted to try something new), and I know that some of these questions will sound incredibly dumb, but please bear with me!!

I need to make a new layer on the thing I'm working on. Whenever I go to the layer menu, all of the options are faded so that I can't use them. I don't know if I did something weird, or if it's because this is the trial version... I don't know.

Also, I need to fill this new layer once I get it on there... where's the fill bucket?