About a year ago, I had to install a Citrix ICA Client to connect to a SAP system from my home laptop. I searched on the internet to find a simple tutorial to explain how to run it under Ubuntu, and fortunately I found this one. Some steps differed a little, and I found some problems that wasn’t covered in this page (fortunately, I found the solution in another forum). In this post, I will summarise my steps to perform the installation. Thanks to the creators of the two mentioned pages. 😉
1. Download the Linux x86 tarball for the program from http://mywts.sap.com/download/en.linuxx86.tar.gz . You can find this file in the Download section of http://www.citrix.com .
2. Unpack the tarball in a temporary folder (for this post, it will be /tmp/citrix/):
mkdir /tmp/citrix/
mv linuxx86.tar.gz /tmp/citrix/
cd /tmp/citrix/
gzip -d linuxx86.tar.gz
tar xf linuxx86.tar
3. Run the installation as a super user (root):
sudo ./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 post 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/.
When the installer asks if you’d like to integrate Citrix automatically, answer no.
4. Configure the 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.
5. 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.