The uPortal 101 project was set up to use the Distributed Layout Manager (DLM) from the start but this is not the way that uPortal 2.5 is packaged. When you download uPortal 2.5 it will be configured to run the Aggregated Layout Manager. Many sites have deployed portals using Aggregated Layout Manager but the future uPortal direction is to use DLM so we recommend new installations start with it.
The instructions for making this conversion are detailed in the DLM Administration Guide. This online guide contains very thorough documentation for using DLM.
You can see how DLM works by looking at the dlm.xml, noti