Vanity would be "Me-Sid-Oh"
-Hinto

Independent means that the distro isn't backed by say, rpm/deb mirrors, rather one that is chosen by the distro developers.  That means that the apps in their repos are usually fewer than the ones based on rpm/deb.
-Hinto

EDIT:
In the case of PCLinuxOS, you can go to Distrowatch http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=pclinuxos and see it is a fork of Mandriva.  What this means is that PCLinuxOS used Mandriva as it's start and [probably] recompiled from source and put the binaries on it's mirrors.  The devs at PCLinux [probably] patch/fix/modify where approproate and [probably] tell the Mandriva folks about any problems/fixes they have.  What this means is that any app not found on PCLOS's repo might be found in Mandriva's repo, but it might not work.  Just as all debs from Ubuntu might not work on Debian. (Ubuntu is a fork, too).

I haven't found a good use for it (lvm).  Maybe I'm just naive.
-Hinto

The ssh thing I learned on the Mac first.  It was the first to shutdown X forwarding through rsh.  Debian followed after that. At work, we had rsh on HPUX servers and I always had to figure out how to turn X forwarding back on for my Mac and Debian (done in some archaic cfg file and different for each WM).  Needless to say, there was much rejoicing when the HPUX servers were replaced with linux.  btw... ssh -1 connects to an rsh server.
-Hinto

hmmm... maybe Argentina can get special dispensation now?
I understand your problem.  20 years ago I was doing some robotic work for company in SA.
Hinto

^I just bought a refurb dell 755 (core 2 duo, 4 gb ram) from Amazon for under $140 (including shipping).
-Hinto

The "fun" thing is that if you have more than one PC and you share filesystems through nfs/samba/NAS, then all your PC's become your PC.  That is, if pc1 is churning pretty hard on a java compile, then ssh -X to pc2 will let you do more important things like (browse the web) fiddle with your web application.  The lines really get blurred on which pc is "primary".  In my case, I run a Win7 vmguest for compiling/debugging Windows apps.  That can be pretty resource intensive.  I can kick off a java compile on pc2 so that the Win7 app can consume the jars (from pc2) using JNI.
Nothing but net
-Hinto

ssh (secure shell)
-X (capital X) turns on X Forwarding
so from pc1 to pc2
ssh -X pc2
opens a secure shell on pc2.
If I type thunar, then thunar (from pc2) opens and is displayed on pc1.
(likewise for synaptic, firefox, etc)
-Hinto

Third Day
-H

I see it when I ssh -X to my vsido box and run gtk applications (like synaptic)
-Hinto

Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "pk-gtk-module"
can be solved by

apt-get install packagekit-gtk3-module


-Hinto

That did the trick... installing gdm3 and editing
/etc/gdm3/daemon.conf
[daemon]
# Enabling automatic login
  AutomaticLoginEnable = true
  AutomaticLogin = hinto

...as soon as I find out why there's no gdm in sid
-H

EDIT: apt-get install gdm3

Since lightdm isn't cooperating, I'm going to replace it with gdm.  I know it does auto login.  That's what I ended up doing with siductiom (switching from lightdm to gdm).  Maybe it isn't cut out for mere mortals (like myself ) BTW.. even with my mods, it's still pretty frugal on cpu/mem consumption.
Nice.
-Hinto

@Garthhh,
It's an independent distro.
-Hinto