UWP

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How to get at the virtual UWP2

Use Firefox to connect to https://uwp.rug.nl, log in and choose your application/desktop.
Chrome/Chromium doesn't support the ICA client plug-in properly and only uses HTML5, that however doesn't support a direct connection to your local drives/resources.

How to connect your local drive(s) to https://uwp.rug.nl.

After you've installed the Citrix Receiver a.k.a. the ICA Client, you can add the following to it's config. This will make your local drives available.
Note: On the LWP this is done automatically!

There should be a file "~/.ICAClient/wfclient.ini" in your home dir. Open it with your favourite editor and add the following below the "[WFClient]" header; replacing the path and any settings you want different of course:

DrivePath?=/path/to/your/drive
DriveEnabled?=Yes
DriveReadAccess?=0
DriveWriteAccess?=0
  • ?: choose any UPPERCASE letter that is not already in use by Windows.
  • DriveEnabled: Yes to automatically mount in Windows on login.
  • DriveReadAccess: 0 = yes, 1 = no
  • DriveWriteAccess: 0 = yes, 1 = no

Example:

;********************************************************************
;
;    wfclient.ini
;
;    User configuration for Citrix Receiver for Unix
;
;    Copyright 1994-2006, 2009 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
;
;********************************************************************

[WFClient]
DrivePathH=/home/<username>
DriveEnabledH=Yes
DriveReadAccessH=0
DriveWriteAccessH=0

---8<--- <snip rest of original file> ---8<---



This info is only relevant for old Ubuntu and Debian versions.

Other Ubuntu/Debian versions The packages we use on the LWP are 'uwp' and 'icaclient'. If you are not on the LWP but inside the RuG network, you can install them after you put the following line in your sources.list:

deb http://deb.rug.nl/rug/ubuntu/precise lwp-testing main

Some things to be aware of:

  • Firefox must be installed *before* the ICA client is installed. (The ICA postinstall script changes settings in the Firefox directories.)
  • The icaclient package we use was fixed by us.
  • You may want to avoid fetching any other packages from our repository. If so, be sure to disable the repository again after fetching the packages, and avoid any upgrades until you do so. (Or better yet: use apt pinning.)

There are other sources for the ICA client too. From the Citrix site (these have issues, see below), or from help.ubuntu.com (also fixed, but a bit different from ours).

Issues with the older ICA client The ICA client has issues. Only under Ubuntu Precise did we fix it enough for it to work. We saw it work on Debian Wheezy too.

The packages we offer are 32-bit packages, and they draw in a lot of 32-bit dependencies on your 64-bit machine. Still there is no point in trying to install the 64-bit packages Citrix (or help.ubuntu.com) offers. They contain exactly the same 32-bit executables and libraries, only in a .deb wrapping that says they're 64-bit. Apt goes by that information and fetches all the wrong 64-bit dependency libraries, and things'll only work if you manually install ia32-libs and some extra dependencies that Citrix failed to mention. Which our package did automatically in the first place. And then still you'll have a messed up apt.

The LWP admins take no reponsibility for the Citrix ICA client. It violates the Debian/Ubuntu packaging standards and common sense. In particular:

  • The package is made up of executables compiled on Red Hat (perhaps 6.0), so libraries may be the wrong version or missing altogether.
  • The maintainer scripts are lengthy and utterly untested on Ubuntu. (Judging from the fact that they break on failure to recognize the 'amd64' architecture of Ubuntu machines). They change other applications' trees, and may try to read/write users' homedirs if they get the chance. (On the LWP, they don't get a chance because root cannot read/write on Kerberized NFS4 in our setup.)
  • The client may break without warning at any time.

We have offered our help to Citrix, but received no response so far. There is nothing more we can do. Service calls regarding the Citrix ICA client should go to the UWP2 group.