maven

Hello, I have a couple of questions that I'd appreciate some help with.

ONE.  I'm trying to deploy a portlet to the pluto portal.  I used the
admin autodeploy and it complained that I didn't have a web.xml.  I
don't have one actually, but I was under the impression that the
deployment tool would autogenerate one for me?  There's only a single,
simple portlet in my war file, no servlets.

TWO.  I then tried to use maven to manually deploy the portlet
application.  I had installed maven 2.0.2.  It complains that there is
not pom.xml.  I guess the configuration files have changed on the new
version of maven and the pluto ( 1.0.1 ) is set up to use an older
version of maven.  Is it possible to easily make a pom.xml to use the
newer Maven?  Or should I just install an older version of maven?