Thursday, January 15, 2015

Installing the Horizon View 3.2.0 Client on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64 bit

It was quite a process to get the new Horizon View 3.2.0 Client working on my Chromebook running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64 bit via Crouton.

Previously I had the View Client 2.2.0 installed using the Synaptic Package Manager which was a relatively easy click on the downloaded file (vmware-view-client_2.2.0-0ubuntu0.14.04_i386.deb) and install.

The Horizon View 3.2.0 Linux client is currently only available from VMware in a generic .bundle format package available at: https://download3.vmware.com/software/view/viewclients/CART14Q4/VMware-Horizon-Client-3.2.0-2331566.x86.bundle

Also, the new Linux client is 32-bit only which makes life harder for those running a 64-bit Linux OS.  With today's amounts of cheap RAM, who installs 32 bit anymore??  But at least VMware has finally posted an up to date generic client for Linux on their website, so that's progress.

I installed the .bundle package by using the following terminal commands in the directory the package was downloaded to:

sudo chmod +x VMware-Horizon-Client-3.2.0-2331566.x86.bundle
sudo ./VMware-Horizon-Client-3.2.0-2331566.x86.bundle

Note: for me it seems that having the 2.2.0 client installed was a necessary step (it must install some prerequisites) because the 3.2.0 installer wouldn't launch on another one of my 64 bit Ubuntu test machines unless the 2.2.0 client was already installed.

I checked the options to install everything in the wizard except for Smart Card, and at the end of the installation you are able to scan for any missing dependencies. Turns out that there is quite a few when you are running 64 bit.  Not only would the new client not launch, it broke my previous 2.2.0 client install as well.

So after a lot of trial and error and Googling, I found that the following finally worked:

Run the following commands using root or sudo:
dpkg --add-architecture i386
apt-get update
apt-get install libudev1:i386
apt-get install libtheora0:i386
apt-get install libssl1.0.0:i386
apt-get install libXss1:i386
apt-get install libpulse0:i386
apt-get install libv4l-0:i386
apt-get install libudev1:i386
apt-get install libxml2:i386
apt-get install libXtst6:i386
apt-get install libpcsclite1:i386
apt-get install libuuid1:i386
apt-get install libspeex1:i386
ln -s /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1 /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libudev.so.0
ln -s /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libssl.so.1.0.0 /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libssl.so.1.0.1
ln -s /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libcrypto.so.1.0.1

After this, clicking on scan in the installer reported no errors, and I was able to start the Horizon Client by running the command vmware-view from the command line.  After launch, you can then lock the icon to the Launcher for future use.

I did get one error when starting the client, that the ssl lib was old (version 1.0.1f), but according to Ubuntu it is up to date and patched, so I'm not sure why the Horizon Client is looking for version 1.0.0i.  You can dismiss the error message and make it so it's not shown again.

I'm not sure that all features work completely even with all the pre-requisites installed. For instance, I'm guessing that USB redirection doesn't work, because I don't see an option in any of the menus to connect a USB device.

Hopefully this saves someone a lot of head scratching to get the 3.2.0 client installed on Ubuntu, and I wish VMware would have done most of this work for us by making it available in a .deb package like the 2.2.0 release.

4 comments:

  1. Hi Ken,

    thanks a lot for this good guide. It worked for me except the last step "vmware-view" where I get following message: "vmware-view: error while loading shared libraries: libatk-1.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" Did you have the same issue?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Ken,
    Thx for the guide... now the view client is working....
    if i see any problems i will post here

    ReplyDelete
  3. Having a problem with dual monitors.
    When i boot Lubuntu and open my virtual desktop, the vmware view doesnt recognize the two monitor, and open a Windowed VDI session.
    I need to disconect from the session, and open the view client again, and this time it recognizes the two monitor.
    But when i restart ubuntu the problem happens again....
    any help?

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  4. Hi, I'm trying to install VMware-Horizon-Client-4.4.0-5167967.x64.bundle in my ubuntu 64bit machine

    showing some protocol error, could you please help me on this, it will be a great favor.

    Thank you!!

    ReplyDelete