Portage 2.1 Released
--------------------
 
After many months in development, the Portage team has released
Portage-2.1. This new release sees a great many new features, fixed bugs,
and performance improvements. A detailed description of changes can be
found in the  release notes[1] and  NEWS file[2]. Some highlights,
however, are:
 
 1. http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs. [...] iew=markup
 2. http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs. [...] iew=markup
 
 * confcache integration: In combination with the
dev-util/confcachepackage, users can now benefit from cached configure
checks, speeding up build times for many packages.
 * New cache framework: The Portage cache has been completely overhauled,
leading to massive speed improvements when updating cache after sync, as
well as in other areas.
 * New elog functionality: In the past, important messages from ebuilds
were delivered by means of the einfo, ewarn, and eerror functions, which
print messages to the standard output. However, in a length multi-package
merge, it is very easy for these messages to get lost. The new elog
function allows them to be collected in one place for later inspection,
and should greatly ease the process of upgrading many packages at one
time.
 * New hooks framework: Using /etc/portage/bashrc, users can now define
bash functions to be executed before and after any given ebuild phase.
This can be used to make almost arbitrary customisations to the build
environment, and is a powerful tool for those who need functionality or
behaviour that stock Portage cannot provide.
 * Digest improvements: Portage can now use SHA256 and RMD160 digests in
addition to MD5 for checking the integrity of downloaded files. This
release also introduces support for a new Manifest2 format that should
allow the current Manifest and digest-* files to be unified into one much
more efficient file format.
 * Improved debugging support: using FEATURES="splitdebug" it is now
possible to keep the performance improvements from using stripped
binaries, while still having the debug information around on disk should
it be needed. This should make filing useful bug reports much easier.
 * Colour remappings: Using the /etc/portage/color.map file, you can now
remap the colours that Portage will use in its output. Have you ever
wanted a pretty pink portage? Well now you can, without having to change
the source code.
 * Configuration improvements: Certain config files can now be made into
directories, for easier management (for example,
/etc/portage/package.unmask/kde, /etc/portage/package.unmask/xorg will be
combined to make the old /etc/portage/package.unmask). /etc/portageitself
can also be loaded from different locations, making certain tasks much
simpler.
 * Various other improvements: Certain types of binary security issues can
now be fixed automatically. The initial import of the Portage module
should now be faster in certain circumstances, meaning that external
scripts which import it should see speed improvements. Emerge now supports
a -q or 'really quiet mode' option, reducing its output to a minimum.
 
There is a stabilisation  bug[3] open, where you can track the progress of
this new release towards the stable tree. As of this writing, stable users
on x86, Sparc, HPPA and PPC platforms can use the new release; other
architecture teams should be following in the near future.
 
 3. https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=136198
 
Thanks to Alec Warner[4] and Ned Ludd[5] for taking the time to talk to
the GWN about this release.

It is necessary to create an additional local user on the ESX server to allow remote access through SSH, since by default, the root account is denied SSH access. Once logged in this user privileges can be elevated to root level through the su or sudo commands.