Citrix ICA Client How-To for Linux

Preface

Note: I changed jobs a couple of years ago, and I no longer have access to a Citrix Server, therefore these instructions are to the best of what I had at the time, and may have changed or require tweaking since the last time I executed them.

Fortunately for us Linux users, Citrix provides binaries for connecting to Citrix servers from Linux boxen. Unfortunately, they have made the attempt to oversimplify the installation of their binaries by providing an installation script. The installation script is flawed in that it assumes you want to use Netscape as your browser. And even then it doesn’t seem to install ready-to-use. So for those of us that want to use it with a different browser (and/or Netscape for that matter), we are relegated to hunting google and/or searching for hidden documentation on how to manually install the client. So to Citrix, I say "A for effort" and "F" for not realizing that us linux techies also like to have detailed instructions on how to manually install when the automated install doesn’t suit our needs. And that brings us to the purpose of this page.

Obtaining the Citrix ICA Client

You need to obtain the Citrix ICA Client package. Citrix offers an RPM, but for the purposes of this page, I’m recommending the tarball. Thus, these instructions will be based off of the tarball download.

First, obtain the Citrix ICA Client tarball by going to http://www.citrix.com/ and selecting "Downloads". Or if you specifically want the current Linux x86 tarball, go to http://download2.citrix.com/files/de/products/client/ica/current/linuxx86.tar.gz. From this point on in the documentation, the tarball will be assumed to be the x86 version, so substitute accordingly if you have to.

Unpacking Citrix ICA Client

Once you've obtained the tarball, you need to unpack it. Pick a temporary location to unpack this tarball. For this page, we’ll use /tmp/citrix/. So create the temporary directory, move the tarball to that directory and change into that directory:

mkdir /tmp/citrix/

mv linuxx86.tar.gz /tmp/citrix/

cd /tmp/citrix/

Now unpack the tarball:

gzip –decompress linuxx86.tar.gz

tar xf linuxx86.tar

Now to run the installation command you must be logged in as the super user (root). So change to root (using su, or however).

Execute the installation script, and follow the instructions as prompted:

./setupwfc

Using the default installation directory is highly recommended. If you choose not to, you’ll have to read the install.txt to figure out what environment variables need to be set to get the Citrix ICA Client to work. The rest of this page will assume that the Citrix ICA Client was installed to its default directory. If the default was chosen, the binaries are now installed in /usr/lib/ICAClient/.

Note: I reccomend answering "No" to the installer when it asks if you'd like to integrate Citrix automatically since this How-To handles all of the setup needed.

Configuring Your Browser

These directions should work for Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, and any other Linux Mozilla-based browser. The first step is to find the plugins directory for the browser you wish to configure. The plugins directory is typically found as a subdirectory of the installation directory for your browser. If you are unsure of the location of your plugins directory, you can try the following command to attempt to locate the plugins directory:

find / -name plugins | grep -i "netscape\|firefox\|mozilla"

We’ll assume that we are configuring Firefox, and that Firefox was installed to /opt/firefox. Again the following will have to be done as the superuser (root). Change into the plugins directory of your browser:

cd /opt/firefox/plugins/

Next, create a symlink (aka softlink) to the Citrix ICA Client library:

ln –s /usr/lib/ICAClient/npica.so npica.so

If the Citrix install script was able to find Netscape, it probably already did this step for you.

Connecting to Citrix and Using the Citrix ICA Client

Close all running instances of the browser you configured (just to be safe). Open a new instance of the browser. Type the URL of and connect to your Citrix Server (as though installation were complete). Login to the Citrix server with your user id and password. Once logged in, you should get the mini-desktop with all of your applications. The first time you click on an application, your browser is likely going to popup a dialog box giving you the choice to open the file or save the file. Choose the option to open the file. Where it asks for the application to use on this type of file, type in the path to the wfica application:

/usr/lib/ICAClient/wfica

If given the choice, tell the browser to use this application for all future downloads of this file type.

Congratulations! You have installed and configured the Citrix ICA Client.