VLC doesn't open through terminal or GUI

Question

I installed VLC through terminal but it shows:

bash: /snap/bin/vlc: No such file or directory

I also tried:

which vlc

and it showed:

/usr/bin/vlc

When I try to run it through sudo su, it shows this error:

VLC is not supposed to be run as root. Sorry.
If you need to use real-time priorities and/or privileged TCP ports
you can use vlc-wrapper (make sure it is Set-UID root and
cannot be run by non-trusted users first).

Any idea how I can fix this issue?

I tried using the snap VLC package, which I installed using the terminal, but I couldn't navigate to my Downloads folder. I could only navigate in the "computer" folder, which consists of /bin, /usr, /var, etc. I was able to play the items of the folder I wanted by dragging and dropping.

I'm also only able to open VLC through the terminal. Opening it through the start menu doesn't do anything.

I'm using Zorin OS 16, which is based on Ubuntu 20.04, if I'm not wrong.

Answer 1

You should run

$ /usr/bin/vlc

As for why executing vlc looks for /snap/bin/vlc, I wouldn't know. If you had a snap for vlc installed, I guess it should have worked as well.

Perhaps you have an alias set in your ~/.bashrc or elsewhere. If you find such an alias, and remove it, you could probably start running vlc without the need for prepending the full path.

EDIT

To remove the difficulty, you could check if you actually have any file or soft link /snap/bin/vlc. Check with

$ type vlc
$ ls -al /snap/bin/vlc

Also, you could setup your own alias vlc=/usr/bin/vlc in ~/.bashrc. If that is read after the presumed other alias, you would be ok.

Answer 2

Originally posted as a comment by Nate T:

You may also want to set up an alias, as well.

If you type gedit ~/.bash_aliases, you will see an editor with a file in it. The file may or may not be blank.

At the bottom (or the top if the file is empty), add the following:

alias vlc=/usr/bin/vlc

Be sure not to change anything else. Now, when you type vlc in the terminal, it will run the command /usr/bin/vlc.

You can do this with any command, or set of commands that you use often, to shorten the amount of characters that need typed.

In case this doesn't work in your current environment (and the file you edited earlier was blank), run the following command:

printf '\n\nif [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then\n    source ~/.bash_aliases\n fi\n\n' >> ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc 

This will add the needed code to the proper file, in order to source the .bash_aliases file.

You can also add the line to ~/.bashrc, but save this option to be used only as a last resort, in case you cannot get it to work using ~/.bash_aliases.

Answer 3

If you had VLC installed as snap, removed it, and then re-installed it via apt(-get), your error means that the location table still uses an old entry. That issue was raised and solved here on SuperUser

You can confirm this by typing:

type vlc

and it may print something like vlc is hashed (/snap/bin/vlc). So, all you should have to do is type this in the terminal once:

hash vlc

Note that this will produce no output message. After that, run vlc as normal and it should work.