There *is* a linux citrix client [LWN.net]

There is a linux citrix client

Posted Dec 31, 2005 11:19 UTC (Sat) by dps (subscriber, #5725)
In reply to: US Government Grants Site not Linux Friendly by jwb
Parent article: US Government Grants Site not Linux Friendly

Although you would not have guessed it from grants.gov a citrix metaframe client is available for linux already. You can download it from citrix's website. Citrix even provide a version for linux/ARM, various other unix flavours and MacOS. (The linux/x86 version apparently works on some
*BSD flavours of unix too.)

grants.gov presuambly spent $$$$$ citrix metaframe and would have got better performance and a more secure solution by using HTML (and SSL/TLS if they need an encrypted connection). I am not sure how widely web 2.0/AJAX support is...and see no good reason why old fanionshed XHTML 1.0 transitioal or HTML 4.01 with optional assistence from lowest common demoninator javascript would not be sufficient.

In short if grants.gov had to choose a "windows remote display" solution then citrix is more cross-platform than most. Some non-windows users proably use Solaris on a SPARC platform, which is common in university computer science departments. M$ office has minimal utility if you are writing a big document or use a lot of mathematics (*TeX excels in this area, partly because it was designed for this sort of document).

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There *is* a linux citrix client

Posted Jan 2, 2006 13:06 UTC (Mon) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

As you say - citrix ica/metaframe has reasonable cross-platform support, but to give you an idea of the usefulness of that support outside the mainstream, I offer you a datapoint. Two years ago I spent a week or two trying to get the linux/arm client to work on something other than the Netwinder/Red-Hat target it was compiled for (in 2000), with very limited success, despite access to Citrix Support.

This merely illustrates the problems of binary-only 'support' for software as diverse as GNU/Linux on multiple architectures.

In practice it seems that even Windows Remote Desktop is actually (much) better-supported than Citrix MetaFrame because there is a published standard for it, and corresponding Free Software (rdesktop).

The situation may have improved since last time I prodded it (although the posted ARM client download is still ancient), but my current advice to anyone with a choice would be use NX, VNC, or Rdesktop before Citrix, especially if you need to use it on anything non-x86.