Ah, an AVI file, which is itself a container format (i.e. it could possibly contain one of many formats inside the file). It's highly likely your file is a DivX video, since that codec can reside in AVI containers. Do yourself a favor and download VLC. It'll play DivX and pretty much anything else you throw at it: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html

VLC is free (open-source to be precise) and it won't take up much room at all (it's a 9 MB download). It's like the foobar2000 of video players.

What I still want to know is why you're doing desktop stuff on a server OS.