I am running Ubuntu Mate 18.04 and would appreciate help on restablishing the keyboard indicator in the panel. Used to have (en) and (pt - for Portuguese) which I though I could replace for country flags. Now I have a red round icon with a white dash in the middle. No language indication at all but clicking on it will show the language in use. I would very much like to go back to (en) and (pt) signs. How can I do it?
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You can do it by installing ibus. Just install it, open the IBus Preferences and check the Show icon on system tray option.
If you have two layouts like English and Portuguese, it will show up as EN and PT…
See this Q&A on AskUbuntu.
On 18.04 LTS you need one simple command to show flags:
gsettings set org.mate.peripherals-keyboard-xkb.indicator show-flags true
If you have problems with keyboards layouts you can re-add them with
gsettings set org.mate.peripherals-keyboard-xkb.kbd layouts "['us', 'pt']"
and enjoy:
Ibus is not needed, I think.
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Thank you, Apollonius & Norbert,
thanks for your messages. In the end I upset you for nothing: I turned off my laptop last night (with that very ugly icon) and when I turned on this morning, I had the two flags on the panel!
Marvellous! Thanks again.
btw, Norbert, my flag is Brazil’s …
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gsettings set org.mate.peripherals-keyboard-xkb.kbd layouts "['us', 'br']"
No problem: 
Dear Norbert,
you may remember my earlier posting on having country flags on the panel to indicate different layouts for the keyboard.
As I told you, your piece of advice ended up by being not necessary, as my laptop did it by itself.
But now I have the same problem: instead of the flags, there is in the panel a red button - sort of a no-entry traffic sign.
My question now: how to use gsettings? I tried the terminal but it did not work.
Best
I have checked this again on my clean Ubuntu MATE 18.04.1 LTS VM.
Here I performed two actions:
gsettings set org.mate.peripherals-keyboard-xkb.indicator show-flags true
gsettings set org.mate.peripherals-keyboard-xkb.kbd layouts "['us', 'br']"
For sure you can reinstall the package with icons:
sudo apt-get install --reinstall mate-icon-theme
and change ownership of folders with configuration:
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER ~/.config ~/.local
I have two keyboard layout flags on all default desktop themes - Ambiant-MATE, TraditionalOK, etc.
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