TOPIC: CITRIX SYSTEMS
Resolving a Linux Mint and Windows keyboard shortcut conflict encountered when using SAS Enterprise Guide in a remote Citrix session
20th February 2026
Here is a gotcha, slight though it is, that caught me when working in SAS Enterprise Guide on a Windows system to which I was connecting from Linux via Citrix. What I wanted to do was use the keyboard shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + U to convert text to upper case in the program editor, only for it to produce a black square and nothing else.
What I was encountering was a clash in keyboard shortcut assignments. On Linux Mint, CTRL + SHIFT + U activates Unicode character input mode. The black square was there for me to enter a hexadecimal code to add a character that my keyboard would not facilitate in normal circumstances. While the facility clearly has its uses, it was getting in my way and a solution had to be found.
Taking the simple route, I changed the keyboard shortcut to avoid the clash. Though others may want to go further than this, that was enough for me. At the command line, I issued the following command so that I could accomplish this:
ibus-setup
In the application screen that appeared, I navigated to the Emoji tab. To the right of the Unicode code point box, I clicked on the button with four dots. That led me to another dialogue box where I could change the modifier keys. Thus, I unchecked the box for SHIFT and ticked the one for SUPER (the Windows key on many keyboards these days) instead, before clicking on the OK button to confirm the setting. With that completed, I closed the IBus Preferences screen.
Now, I had CTRL + SUPER + U instead of CTRL + SHIFT + U. This meant that the CTRL + SHIFT + U in Enterprise Guide worked exactly as I expected it to do. A baffling situation had been resolved to leave me working without intrusion.
Adding line breaks in Excel in a Citrix Windows session on a Mac
18th August 2025
Today, I tried connecting to a client system using my Mac Mini. Everything went well, aside perhaps from some resizing, apart from something more crucial: adding a line break in a cell in an Excel spreadsheet. The usual combination of ALT+ENTER was not doing the needful. Instead, I needed to use CMD+OPTION+ENTER, as it would be on a Mac keyboard. Since I use a Windows one inside, it looks like this: WIN+ALT+ENTER. It was only by looking through the options for the Citrix Workspace app that came upon this after being prompted to do so by ChatGPT, itself not supplying the fully correct information that I needed. Now, all I need to do is remember to use the correct keyboard shortcut, and I am away.
Ubuntu 10.10 and Citrix
15th January 2011
Many of us with the opportunity to work from home will have met up with logging via a Citrix server. With that in mind, I set to getting an ICA client going on my main Ubuntu box at home. There is information scattered about the web in the form of a question on the Ubuntu forum and a step-by-step guide by Liberian Geek. To summarise the process that I followed here, you have to download a copy of the Citrix Receiver installer for Linux from the company's website. There, you'll see DEB and RPM packages, along with a tarball for other systems. The latter needs a bit more work, so I got the x86 DEB package and installed that in the usual way, using Ubuntu's Software Centre to do the installation following the download. Needing to start the Citrix connection via a browser session meant that a browser restart was needed too. That wasn't the end of the leg work because Thawte certificate errors were to stop me in my tracks until I downloaded their root certificates from their website. Once the zip file was on my PC, I extracted it and copied the required certificate (Thawte Server CA.cer from the thawte Server CA directory) to /usr/lib/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts on my system; it helped that the error message had told me which was the one I needed from the collection in the zip file. With that matter addressed, the connection happened without a glitch, and I was able to get to working without recourse to a Windows virtual machine. For once, Linux wasn't to be excluded from one of the ways of using computers that has been getting more prevalent these days.
Update 2012-04-14: On an equivalent installation on Linux Mint Debian Edition, I found that the installation location for the certificate had moved to /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts. This was for the 64-bit edition.
Update 2012-12-17: The above applied to an installation of version 12.10 on 32-bit Ubuntu GNOME Remix too.