Comment 8 for bug 293154

To be the big deal is the feeling that big brother is dictating what I can or can not do. It's the principal. My beef is with the developers of VLC, not Ubuntu. No harm in asking.

Jonn Dong said: "If you're smart enough to run everything as root you should be smart enough to figure out how to do that." - that's exactly my point, if I'm smart enough run as root, I should be able to run my apps as root!

For those that may stumble upon this post, this is a work-around that worked me, that should survive updates... - change non_priv_user to a username on your box with UID >1000.

root@laptop:~# cat /usr/local/sbin/vlc
#!/bin/sh

user="non_priv_user"
xhost local:$user ; su -c "/usr/bin/vlc $@" $user

I was able to run videos from the command line and nautilus. In KDE 4.1 I had to change the vlc launch command from vlc to /usr/local/bin/vlc for some reason, even though /usr/local/sbin is first in the path.

Regardless my final solution is to uninstall vlc and use mplayer and xine instead.

apt-get purge vlc
apt-get autoremove

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"There's a line to draw between offering users...freedom..." - John Doug