I am out of ideas of how to run videos at a remote machine that has a display. I have a debian system with gnome installed and everything is set up but I just don´t now how to start the video over anything. I have tried simply to start #vlc video file - but this way it thinks that I want to run it in my bash over at a nother computer.
I tried installing vnc but this just ports a new desktop and masically is a terminal which does not give me any control over the display.

Anyone know how to go about solving this problem?

Thank you

VNC doesn't have to give you a new session, you can use it to share the current session.
On the machine where GNOME is running, enable Remote Desktop Sharing. There's a desktop of how to do that at
http://www.debianadmin.com/remote-de...in-ubuntu.html
the page talks about Ubuntu but what it's describing is actually a feature of GNOME not Ubuntu.


If you've logged in to the remote machine with ssh and try to run VLC then by default it will look for an X server running on your machine not the remote one. You can fix this by finding the values of $DISPLAY and $XAUTHORITY environment variables in the GNOME session and then set them in your ssh session like this
Then if you run vlc it should open on the remote machine's display.
That assumes that you are running as the same user in both the GNOME and ssh sessions, otherwise you won't have permission to read the file that $XAUTHORITY refers to.

I think you would need to do the ^ above plus run cvlc instead of vlc.

Thank a lot, it worked perfectly.
Though, I was kinda stupid enough not to look hard enough in my GUI for remote desktop so I installed X11vnc and used that, it wasnt the easiest to do, because the latest debian release is missing the requierd libraries in its repos, so I had to use an ubuntu package, I don´t recommend this path, took me about 5 hours to find the libraries needed.

About the env variables. For other people who might have the same issue and want to execute gui programs through ssh.

1. log into the original machine that has the X configured (call it the server)
enter the command look for DISPLAY and XAUTHORITY variables.
2. Enter the same variables (like said before as the same user) to your bash (putty for me)
Thats it, it works perfectly for me. Thanks a lot arizonagroovejet much appreciated.

related:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...4/#post2400451

If you happen to have an Android device, I just developed a remote control (Yes I know, another one..) that does just that! It connects to your computer with SSH, lets you browse your files and play them. It's exactly the same than what you want to do, except that all the configuration part (the export, start vlc...) is handled directly by the application.

Anyway, if you're interested, the name is SSHmote and you can find it on the Android market or directly from my website where you'll find some more details: www.zokama.com/sshmote.

Hope that helps.

z.

Thx for the tip, I will try it out.

When you do so, please let me know what you think about it. To be honest, you'll be more of a beta tester... So any comment/critic is welcome.