Gnomes-hell shortcut workaround

Question

Yesterday I installed cinnamon. Unfortinately I can't found a way to bind it with any DM except gdm. So I got a broken shortcuts with gnomes-hell. No way to switch keyboard layouts. Keyboard panel applet missing at all. When I trying to add him to panel, I getting the battery and the network applets added instead of keyboard layout. The default shortcut (Ctrl+Space) doesn't work.
I didn't look for solution because developers knows about this issue but does nothing to fix it since 3.6 was released. I think they are going to disable keyboard at all since they can't handle it.
But I need keyboard layout switcher so I've written a small script:
#!/bin/bash
LCUR=`setxkbmap -print | awk -F"+" '/xkb_symbols/ {print $2}'`
L1="us"
L2="<your language here>"
if [[ $LCUR == $L1 ]]; then
setxkbmap $L2
/usr/bin/xset led named 'Scroll Lock'
else
setxkbmap $L1
/usr/bin/xset -led named 'Scroll Lock'
fi
May be it would be useful for someone else. Scroll Lock Led indicates non-us layout.
Currently I have this script binded to Ctrl+Space keys (as custom shortcut).
But I would like to bind it to Ctrl+Shift or Alt+Shift.
Any suggestions are welcome.

Answer 1

I don’t think Cinnamon works very well unless you use it as a session. If you don’t want to use gdm, try lightdm: it’s fairly easy to set up, and supports user-switching.
I’ve been playing around with Cinnamon all weekend and have managed to get it to integrate with my systemd-user setup, though I had to create a target so it wouldn’t start all of my Openbox applications. I’ve set a custom keyboard layout with xkb, but like you, the keyboard layout indicator doesn’t seem to display (even though it’s apparently been added to the panel). It crashes occasionally when you modify keyboard shortcuts too.