The basic argument is that for many languages there are several nationalities that use them, and that using flags as indicators might hurt the feelings of just annoy people (What do you use for English? American flag? UK flag? Maybe Australian flag? etc.).

Further more, in the past there were incidents with the use of some controversial flags that pissed of other nationalities (I’m sure there is a link for that somewhere, can’t find it), so eventually the use of flags as indicators was abandoned.

But what if you don’t care about all this dispute and just want the freedom to use nice icons instead of plain text? There is a fairly simple solution:

The solution is based on this forum post: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/ubuntu-63/keyboad-indicator-icons-575083/ , this technique should work on all Ubuntu versions from Feisty to Karmic.

Step 1:

Goto http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/flags/ download the free flags package and extract the /png directory (I will use ~/Downloads/ in this example)

Step 2:

Copy or move the contents of this directory to /usr/share/pixmaps (I read that ~/.icons/flags might work too, haven’t tried it):

sudo mv ~/Downloads/png/* /usr/share/pixmaps/

Step 3:

From the menu launch Applications -> System Tools -> Configuration Editor, and drill down to desktop -> gnome -> peripherals -> keyboard -> indicator.

Check the useFlags checkbox, your language indicator will immediately change from text to the corresponding flag.

Oh, and the “Day of the Cones” image too  

Thanks Dude

A couple of years ago the VideoLan team had a redesign contest for the VideoLan website.

I posted my take on the design.  Unfortunately for me my design was not picked, though it was the (very close) runner up.

The VideoLAN team approached me afterwards , told me that they really liked the icons I created for my design and asked if I can help with the icons for the upcoming 0.9 release.

It took me a while, but eventually I came up with a set of icons that I really like.

I wanted them to express the do-it-all nature of VLC and at the same time to keep a friendly feel.

It started with some rough sketches:

After some trial and error sessions I decided to go for the 3D feel.

I have no good knowledge in 3D design software so I created everything in Adobe Illustrator, using the pseudo-3D techniques it offers.

The final icons are these:

I’m really proud of these little cone guys

All the icons are released under GPL, including the source .ai files (although I never really published them, I’ll find some place to put them online if people ask me to, they are really bloated…)

And of course, kudos to the VideoLAN team for their efforts to make the best media player around even better.