Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.
I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.
Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.
Even though I have a working Citrix installation in Fedora 22, my recent failure to replicate it in Debian Jessie has me worried.
To that end (and so I will have a place to go when I need to do this again and again), here is a list of Citrix-on-Linux how-tos:
Citrix: Receiver 13.1 for Linux
Install Citrix Receiver 13.1 on Fedora 21 x64 by Chris Savage
Installing Citrix on Fedora 21 by Ken Fallon
Citrix Receiver on Fedora 19 64 bits from Ask Fedora
CITRIX ICA (RECEIVER) 13.1 UNTER FEDORA 20 (64BIT) from iSticktoit.net (in German, but understandable from a Linux perspective)
CITRIX RECEIVER 13.2 (ICA) ON FEDORA 22 (KDE) from iSticktoit.net (in English)
Ubuntu Community Help Wiki: CitrixICAClientHowTo
Installing Citrix Reciver on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) by Ken Fallon
Quora: How do I run the Citrix ICA Client on Ubuntu? by Cesar Augusto Nogueira
Superuser.com: How do I install Citrix ICA Client (Receiver) 13 on Debian 64-bit Linux?
(Often the Arch Linux Wiki can help users of any Linux system, regardless of distribution)
Update on Nov. 18, 2015: I finally did succeed in getting Citrix ICA installed and running on Debian Jessie.
I can't find the exact web page I used for help, but the "core" of my successful method was adding the i386 architecture, updating my sources and then installing Citrix from the .deb
package:
# dpkg --add-architecture i386
# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade
# dpkg -i icaclient(bunch of other stuff).deb
So I now have Citrix ICA working in Debian. I use it through Chromium, so I don't have to go through any machinations to get CACerts into Firefox/Iceweasel.
Now that I have Citrix working on Debian, the stable Jessie release is a viable alternative for me. But since I've grown very accustomed to having the much-newer packages of Fedora (and I'm not as willing to run Debian Sid), I am looking at Xubuntu, staying with Fedora, or the Korora spin of Fedora.
The original post:
I've been having networking issues on the Fedora 22 installation I've been using and upgrading since it started out with Fedora 18 in early 2012.
None of my attempts at fixes seem to bring the network (principally the wired network, whether I'm using it or not) back after suspend/resume, though I have a quick-and-dirty script that I can run from my application panel when I need it.
So that means it's time to audition new distros. I love Debian, and I tend to end up with it when my hardware starts to age. And yes, a 3 1/2-year-old laptop is aging as these things go.
So I'm auditioning distros. I continue to like Xubuntu, and reinstalling Fedora is always an option, especially since the networking problem is not present in the live environment.
But I wanted to try Debian Jessie. I'd love to be running Debian Stable.
I had to set up my laptop to access a new Citrix site, and I got the dreaded SSL Error 61, where the proper certificate could not be found.
It was a Go Daddy certificate, and I knew that I had it. I went to Go Daddy, got another copy and dropped it into /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts/
.
The error persisted.
After a few other unsuccessful attempts, I found the answer at Ask Fedora.
Basically you find the right certificate by going through Firefox itself, exporting the certificate and then using rootly privileges to put it in /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts/
.
In Firefox, go to the web site for your Citrix app. It should be a secure site.
Click on the little lock icon to the left of the URL.
Click "More Information"
Click "View Certificate"
Click "Details"
You should now see the certificate(s) you need. Click on them to select and then click "Export," and save it/them somewhere in your /home
directory
Use the terminal and either su
or sudo
to copy the certificates to /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts/
.
Everything should work. At least it did for me.
I wasn't even going to write about how I used to run Citrix on Windows 8 instead of Linux on my HP laptop because my particular Citrix-delivered application reacted poorly to the horrible DSL Extreme broadband service at home and its frequent (every three minutes or so) total dropouts. Maddeningly, the crucial link to "reconnect" to my application was present the Firefox and Chrome web browsers under Windows but absent in those same browsers under Linux.
No, I was instead going to write about how to configure Citrix in Linux to allow you to access local drives via your Citrix apps. I'd like to thank the Ubuntu community for that very helpful portion of an overall Citrix-on-Linux page that has helped me many times.
But since I'm already going this road, here is how and why I decided to do my Citrix-based production work in Fedora Linux instead of Windows 8.
Initially I thought I "had" to use Windows for the ungainly Citrix-delivered apps that my employer requires, including Adobe InCopy (which I wouldn't wish on anybody) and a proprietary CMS from Hell. That was when I was having Internet issues at home and kept getting disconnected from my Citrix apps.
But since then I've "solved" my broadband issue, and the connection is slow yet consistent (as opposed to slightly faster but extremely inconsistent; thanks DSL Extreme, who I'm dropping as soon as my contract ends).
So once I had "consistent" broadband, I thought I was home free. I could run my Citrix apps under Windows 8 (the 8.1 upgrade fails for me every time, probably because I dual-boot Fedora, and an encrypted Fedora at that) and all would be well.
Except that Win 8 started crashing. Yeah, I'm stressing the #$%& out of it, but that's how I work.
I had a pretty good day yesterday running the dodgy over-Citrix apps I need for my . But when bandwidth is poor and I keep getting disconnected, the only way I can manage to keep working is to run the Citrix apps in Windows (in my case Windows 8, not even 8.1 because that update went pear-shaped when I tried it months ago).
What happens is the bits on my DSL connection stop flowing for a minute or so, and I get disconnected from my Citrix apps. In Windows, there's an option on the Citrix page in my browser to reconnect to my "paused" resources. That option doesn't exist on the web page in Linux. Could it be because I'm using a slightly older version of Citrix Receiver / Wfica / ICA / Whatever the hell it is in Linux?
All I know is that it's a pain in the ass. When I'm on a "strong" networking connection with a ton of bandwidth, this isn't a problem, and I can probably run the Citrix apps in Linux. But with my not-so-great home "broadband," I need the extra cushion of being able to easily reconnect to my Citrix apps in order to stay working.