Application virtualization, IoT and Cloud Computing, Blog of Sacha Thomet

Receiver

Citrix Receiver 4.11 – Keyboard and Language Bar

In Citrix Receiver 4.11 there is a new feature for Improved Control Over the Remote Language Bar for Seamless Published Applications (See https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX231913 ). This is especially for us here in Switzerland nice and important as we have four official spoken languages and also different Keyboard layouts. There is German, French, Italian and Romansh. Romansh is more or less neglected but beside German the languages French and Italian play a significant role.

As I plan to roll out the Receiver 4.11 in my company, my aim is to keep the possibility open for the user for configure that on receiver, but I want to have a pre-defined setting. By the way, earlier we always hid the Language bar by making use of the SeamlessFlags (on server side). But I experienced that this had in Server 2016 a negative impact to the logon time, don’t ask me why … But it’s a fact and i’s reproducible so I keep the Language bar visible and now I’m very happy that this is configurable in Receiver.

The configuration of this both features is is described here https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/receiver/windows/current-release/improve/keyboard-layout-and-language-bar.html and it’s possible to hide this Advanced feature with a reg Key.
But there is just described the config via GUI for the user! And there is today no way to configure that in the ADMX 🙁 

With the help of ProcMon and Total Commander I just found out which two settings are getting touched when User set this preferences:

Local Keyboard is in the good old Appsrv.ini – the value is LocalIME=1 to use the local keyboard

Language Bar is HKCU\SOFTWARE\Ica Client\Engine\Configuration\Advanced\Modules\LocalIME
DWORD: DisableLanguageBar

So if you want to configure this for all users you need to “patch” the AppSrv.ini to set the local Keyboard and/or Adjust the reg key above to disable the Language Bar on receiver side.