thanks guys. My keyboard starts with . I will also buy the russian key stickers to stick to my keyboard, I think I like that more :-)

I just noticed this thread and it looks like you may have reached a solution, so please ignore this post if you are happy with what you now have...

I recently needed to accomplish the same thing, to switch between English and Cyrillic keyboard mappings (well, 15 months ago). With the help of LQ member bormant I was able to arrive at a simple and painless solution that I now use almost daily.

I needed to support the alternate keymap in both console and X applications, which require slightly different methods. I set them both to use the Caps-lock key as the switch and the transition is seamless.

I decided on the phonetic mappings and find it very easy use. I will not likely ever use a true Cyrillic, йцукен, keyboard and find the phonetic quite natural for my uses,

You can find my original thread with lots of helpful information here. I hope it is helpful!

Удачи!

I managed to sort things out in the end thank. That said, today I added a key switch (alt + cap lock) and something really interesting happens. When I press that combination of keys the language does in fact change (the little keyboard icon goes from en to ru) but you know what? When I type the keyboard is still typing in english! Only if click on the keyboard icon in my taskbar and, even if russian is already selected, only if I click on russian again, I can type cyrillic characters. That's rather odd, has anybody come across this one before? So if I change the language with the mouse, it works but if I use the key combination even if the language does change in the taskbar, it doesn't change when I type