Display current layout (language code/country flag) in keyboard indicator

10.10

Yes, the icon doesn't reflect the language chosen. I think it may have something to do with the fact that showing "flags" would often be inappropriate. (Examples: flag of Great Britain in India, flag of Germany in Austria, flag of France in Senegal).

The current metaphor, i.e. KEYBOARD → Langauge is very much in accordance with user experience guidelines.

The behaviour you're describing was removed quite some time ago. It was another application (can't remember the name) that dealt with keyboard layouts then. (At least I remember something like that, I'm not quite sure now come to think of it)

What i did to get the above screen shot was go to Keyboard-Layouts, select add, Hebrew/Israel and add it to the list. My system has been upgraded since 9.10, so it should be the same on nearly every Ubuntu installation.

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The old behaviour is still lurking in the system. If you want the indicator to show Flags, you can open gconf-editor, got to /desktop/peripherals/keyboard/indicator and enable "showFlags". However, you'll need the relevant flags to be in /home/<username>/.icons/flags (press CTRL+H to show directories that start with a period). The flag of israel should be named il.png (which is israels ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code).

12.10

By default the keyboard indicator in 12.10 shows a keyboard icon and the 2-letter abbreviation of the layout.

If you want to show the country flags instead, you have to do two things

1. Set the configuration option for dconf:

   dconf write /org/gnome/libgnomekbd/indicator/show-flags true

2. Install the flags icons in the ~/.icons (not ~/.icons/flags) folder. An easy way to do this is by installing famfamfam-flag-png and linking the icons to your folder by

   ln -s /usr/share/flags/countries/16x11/*.png ~/.icons/

Ubuntu 12.04

The keyboard indicator appears when you have more than one keyboard layout defined.

The country is displayed using the 2-letter code

for example - france:

how-to

Search in Dash for keyboard layout

Note

Unlike in 10.10 - whilst there is a gconf entry for keyboard, there is not a similar show-flags key.

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If you want the country flag to be displayed instead of the keyboard indicator, you can use a small applet called gxneur.

gxneur

To do this, we need to whitelist gxneur. Use dconf-editor:

dconf-tools

• Add gxneur as shown.
• Logout and login.
• Start gxNeur from Dash.
• This will display the applet.
• Right-click the displayed applet, choose Keyboard Properties and select the Properties tab. Ensure the Auto Startup checkbox is ticked.
• Next you need to disable the standard keyboard-indicator. Follow the instructions in this Q&A to achieve this.