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Is there any programs that would let me remotely install software? I have a media center PC, and when I fine apps or addons for it, I dont want to have to VNC in or hookup a mouse or a keyboard to it to install software.

May not be quite what you are looking for, but...

https://secure.logmein.com/

Sign up for LogMeIn free. It's like VNC, only way more stable, and doesn't use as much bandwidth.

captain_twinkie wrote:Is there any programs that would let me remotely install software? I have a media center PC, and when I fine apps or addons for it, I dont want to have to VNC in or hookup a mouse or a keyboard to it to install software.

I think VNCing in is your best option. The closest thing to what I think you're thinking of are network deployments, but they're usually program-specific. A network deployment usually involves a start-and-forget install that doesn't bother asking you about options.

Depending on the version of Media Center, you might be able to connect using Remote Desktop Connection (if Wikipedia is correct only the original release wouldn't support it). Since that's built into the OS, you shouldn't need to do anything special except open a firewall exception.

Unfortunately, unlike most Unix-based operating systems, not a whole lot of Windows software supports being installed through a non-graphical user interface in any meaningful way. If it's a .MSI you could more likely do so by means of msiexec (provided you were still able to execute shell commands on the target machine remotely - might need to install something third-party like an SSH host for that since I don't know of an in-built Windows analogue save for a remote debugger connection, which is probably not an appealing option), but usually installers will ask you to pick some options (and probably agree to terms and conditions), which you need to see the GUI for ... well, I can think of some workarounds, but you'd have to be crazy to actually use them.

What operating system? I assume because you didn't state you are probably unfortunately running some version of Windows. That severely limits your options on a media center PC with regards to remote management. You pretty much answered your own question, log in through VNC and do it that way.

But if you don't want to log in to install anything how do you expect it to get done? You want to telepathically tell your machine to install something for you?