I get used to the following combination to change keyboard layouts:
Ctrl+ Shift+ 7 change to english
Ctrl+ Shift+ 8 change to russian
Ctrl+ Shift+ 9 change to chinese
How to do it with Ubuntu 11.10?
If you go to System Settings -> Keyboard
and then open Shortcuts tab you can setup custom shortcuts for performing the change.
You can add new shortcut and use the command setxkbd
to switch layout. If you run setxkbd us
your keyboard will be set to US layout. You'll have to look up the rest of layout codes.