There is a great blog post from Ingmar Verheij explaining the new HP Smart Client software which is part of the new HP flexible Thin Client series (T410,T510,T610). Please read his blog to get a better understanding about the HP Smart Client software.

In this blog I will show you how you can customize the appearance of the Smart Client, I will give an example how to change the login page when connecting to a Citrix back-end, but you can also use this information when customizing the Smart Client for other protocol connections.

Ok lets start from scratch :
When you configure the Smart Client for use with XenApp\XenDesktop you will get the following logon screen :

(Screenshot is taken with a camera)

As you can see HP made a default page that looks very similar to the Citrix Web Interface 5.4 layout. In the Smart Client admin guide, there is a chapter about customizing the layout but I found it very unclear. So my goal was to get the existing files from the Smart Client to get an example of how this login page is constructed. Because every door on the Smart Client is locked, in terms of remote file management, there is no easy way to get to the files on the Smart Client.

To fetch the files I used the drive mapping feature of the Citrix Receiver for Linux, the default location of the drive redirection is \media, this is the mount point in Linux for USB sticks and other storage devices. By default this folder is mapped as drive leter Z: in the session. In the profile editor enable drive mapping and change the drivePathMappedOnZ value to /etc, see the below screenshot  :

After rebooting the Smart Client, logon to a XenApp\XenDesktop session and open the drive letter Z: You will now see the content of the ETC folder from the Smart Client, browse to the following folder hptc-zero-login\styles there you will find all the default styles from the different connection protocols, see screenshot :

In this case we will open the xen folder, because we want to edit the Citrix login page styles. Copy the folder from the Smart Client to a different location so we can start editing them, in the folder you will find this 2 files :

bgConfig.rtf

This file consists of the layout setting of the login screen, it’s very easy to edit this file and make customization to it, so I will not cover all the options but instead give an example :

Change the background color to white :

global {
color: FFFFFF; # White
padding: 20; # 20 pixels
}

Change the default footer text :

text {
name: ad line;
text: Welcome to bikinis.com, type in your cup size and password to continue;
position: %50%,85%;
alignment: hcenter vcenter;
color: 000000;
font-size: 16pt;
max-width: 98%;
context: login;
}

Change the logo :

image {
name: computers image;
source: /usr/share/icons/hptc-zero-login/mypicture.png;
position: 50%,50%;
alignment: hcenter vcenter;
context: login;
}

As you can see the image source directory is on the USR directory, if you want to retrieve them simply change the ETC drive redirect folder from the previous step to USR and browse to the /usr/share/icons/hptc-zero-login folder.

XenDesktop.qss

In this file you can edit the dialog text, in this example I will change it to Dutch :

}
LoginArea QLabel#loginHeader {
qproperty-text: Welkom;
color: white;
font-size: 20pt;
text-align: left;
}
LoginArea QLabel#userLabel {
qproperty-text: Gebruikersnaam;
color: white;
font-size: 12pt;
}
LoginArea QLabel#passwdLabel {
qproperty-text: Wachtwoord;
color: white;
font-size: 12pt;
}
LoginArea QLabel#domainLabel {
qproperty-text: Domein;
color: white;
font-size: 12pt;
}

Ok now we want to deploy this custom files to all the Smart Clients out there, to do this open the Profile editor and go to the additional Configuration Files section, add the files like this :

Now reboot the Smart Client and voila  :

Conclusion :
In this blog post I explained how you can customize the appearance of the HP Smart Client. You can also use this Drive Redirect option to view other files on the Smart Client such as the ICA client files. In this way you can deploy custom settings to the Smart Client by editing the files and deploy them through the Smart client Profile editor. This is useful when you cannot find the setting in the registry options in the Profile editor.

* Note you can also redirect the style directory so you can place them in a different folder, in this case I used the default locations, but the style directory can be set to a custom location with this option :

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Please note that the information in this blog is provided as is without warranty of any kind.