Long ago, my xkb-based keyboard switcher method stopped working. I then moved over to using gnome-keyboard-properties to set up the keyboard switching. This worked for another several years until recent ubuntu changes in oneiric that removed the stand-alone gnome-keyboard-properties. Worse yet, the gnome-control-center crashes on me if not running from gnome-session.
Being loyal user of FVWM2 window manager for 15 years (see my config
over here), I dug out the xkb keyboard switching files and fixed them to work with the evdev keyboard type. This works on ubuntu oneiric (11.10) system.
Here are the download links to my xkb files:
To load them use the following command:
xkbcomp -R/usr/share/X11/xkb/ russian.xkb $DISPLAY
