Created attachment 171959 [details]
Screenshot showing a multilingual setup 

As reported in Launchpad bug #531173 ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-settings-daemon/+bug/531173 ), the GNOME keyboard layout indicator, starting with version 2.30 does not indicate the current layout - it just shows an icon of a keyboard.

Users with multiple keyboard layouts, especially multilingual users that type completely different character sets in different layouts, must know which layout is current when they start to type. The current behavior of just showing an icon of a keyboard is very serious regressing compared with the previous implementation.

Please note - while the problem is reported against the version of GNOME that ships with Ubuntu 10.10 (its not the latest stable, 2.32, but I believe the latest behaves the same), the problem is not with the Ubuntu-specific "application/session indicator applet", which works fine. The problem can only be reproduced by removing the Ubuntu-specific indicator applet, or by using GNOME Shell (which does not support the indicator applet).

As can be seen in the screenshot, the keyboard indicator icon does not actually show the type of layout that is selected, while it did so in the past.