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Raspberry Pi 2 and Citrix Receiver – Thin Clients

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UPDATE: The new release is out! http://danblee.com/raspberry-pi-2-rpitc-2-r1-1-is-out/

I’ll be using this post as a living document for our discoveries.

Now that the Raspberry Pi 2 is out and performing very well, we decided to start toying with the idea of putting our Citrix based product on one and delivering a thin client to customers. The extra RAM (1GB) can be given to the graphics which means performance really took a step up.

As of now, the Raspberry Pi 2 is very new, too new for a Windows guy like me to finagle into doing things I want it to do. We found great documentation on how to install Receiver 13.1 on Ubuntu here, but Ubuntu didn’t work in the same theory on the Raspberry Pi 2 as these instructions explained. There’s apparently good reason for it to not work on the Raspberry Pi 2. zo0ok (what’s your real name?) has a technical explanation here.

RPi-TC 2 to the Rescue

There’s a current project over at http://rpitc.blogspot.com/ that’s made some amazing headway with a Pi image for the 2 that has a ton of thin client options including Receiver, VMware Horizon, 2X, Thinlic, Rdesktop, xFreeRDP, Virt-Viewer, and more. Their current project for the 2 can be found here: http://rpitc.blogspot.com/2015/02/rpi-tc-2-beta-image-out-pcoip-ready.html

Getting our product working with our Security Certificates

The biggest trouble we found using this image was getting Security working. Citrix Receiver 13.1 was installed on the RPi-TC 2 beta image but making it play nice with our security certificates was daunting. Here are the steps that we took to get Receiver to launch both from the Web (Ice Weasel) and via the Receiver app.

  1. On a Raspberry Pi 2 B, install the latest image from their project found here.
  2. Fire it up and open a terminal when you are logged in.
    1. Sudo Username and Password: Pi\raspberry
    2. Root Username and Password: root\root
  3. Change to root. Some things will not work unless you do them as root.
  4. Download your certificate as a .crt and put it in the /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts folder.
    1. Note: if you have an intermediate cert, you’ll need to create a folder called ../keystore/intcerts and put it in there.
  5. To get the Web Browser to work, you’ll need to head over to your Citrix website and choose to “Always Allow” the plugin. You may need to close your browser and reopen it after you have chosen to allow.
  6. Before you try to use the Receiver app, you’ll need to rehash the certificates. To do this, you’ll need to run $ICAROOT/util ctx_rehash
    1. Note: For my installation, $ICAROOT was not an environment variable, so at least make it a variable so you can use it by typing ICAROOT=/opt/Citrix/ICAClient
    2. You can test to see if $ICAROOT is working by using echo $ICAROOT
  7. The keys will rehash and you’ll be able to use Citrix Receiver.

The Citrix Forum for the Linux Receiver 13.1 app is doing god’s work. You may find them helpful.

Next Steps

We’re working to get the Raspberry Pi to automatically load up Receiver on startup, so we can deploy these little guys to offices without the customer even seeing the OS. We’re always welcome to suggestions. I’ll update you with what we find.