I have been messing around with my fairly new installation of Ubuntu 13.10 Gnome, where I installed two keyboard layouts - English (UK) and Russian. They worked well, I could switch them with the quirky Super+Space combination, but up until the point I tried to run Unity alongside Gnome. Mind you, it worked (kind of) - I got the Unity dock etc, but only on the root account.

But then I changed my mind. I didn't want Unity, after all. I uninstalled it by typing sudo apt-get remove --purge unity and sudo apt-get remove --purge ubuntu-desktop, which, as I have later found out, uninstalled Nautilus and other useful things. I had to do a lot of rebooting and reconfiguring (so much that I can't remember) to make things work again, and when I needed the Russian keyboard, I found out that I couldn't change to it. I can assure you, I have tried everything in the Keyboard Settings, and I followed a few Ask Ubuntu threads - here and here.

All of this didn't help me. I also tried editing the /etc/default/keyboard file, but that didn't help either. Now I'm stuck with the English default keyboard, even if I try to remove it through the Keyboard Settings GUI and change it to Russian, I still type in latin alphabet.

P.S. I later found out that changing keyboard layouts works if I login as root, and that changing the system language to Russian works too, but does not affect my keyboard setup.