Ouch. Sounds like you've had a frudtrating couple of days -

First off, sorry about the app - it is nowhere near perfect and I wrote it as an intro to C++ (and OO in general) - so full of bugs, and bad design choices. I mean to write it all up from scratch as soon as I find an empty window.

Explanations:
Your ip addrresses seem fine to me. The log that VLC talks about is it's own log and not phonestreams. I cant remember how to access it, but if you start VLC from commandline you'll see more helpful messages.

The original VLC method SHOULD work though. Sending sdp from n900 to pc should be cake: Hit generate, fill in the username and password for your pc, and it should appear in your Desktop folder (I'll allow custom paths in future releases). The fact that it's giving the timeout message implies networking problems on your side, otherwise it would have given a different message.

Check to see if Openssh client AND server are installed on your linux pc.

There is also the manual method of copying the sdp file yourself.
It is located in MyDocs as n900stream.sdp. You can copy that to your PC and then hit stream on the phone, and open the sdp file on the desktop.

It should work. The send sdp to linux pc method uses a simple ssh script. The fact that that doesn't work suggests that you either have a firewall blocking all connections from your phone, or ssh is not properly installed.

I hope this helps. (yeah I know, still no proper explanation :P)