console issues

Hi folks. I seem to be missing something vital. I "installed" serviio on a headless Debian box and it runs fine and is found by UPNP renderers on my network but there is no media to play. I have media under /home/user/ (the same user serviio is running as) but I suspect I need to configure something in a console. So here is the sticky part, other than serviidroid on a smartphone, I've been unable to get any console to work. They all seem to act like they are a GUI (which won't run on a headless box) and I have no Bill Gates in the house. I've tried two web UIs too. (I suck) Can somebody please tell me what I'm missing? Can you run a console from a remote machine that has a xorg GUI?