Location indicator

Shows your country flag, country ISO code, and IP address of your current location in the system tray. Clicking the tray icon shows an "IP changelog" with the most recent IP changes ever noticed (country, IP, and how long ago, newest first, marked (current)), including ones noticed right after a restart.

For location detection requests to https://api.myip.com/ are sent each 15 seconds.

Requirements

• python3

Other requirements that will be installed automatically:

• jq - used to parse JSON responses from location API
• wget - used to fetch the location API and download country flag SVGs
• python3-gi, gir1.2-appindicator3-0.1 - GTK/AppIndicator bindings used to display the tray icon and its dropdown

Installation

1. Create a directory to store locindicator scripts. It could be any writable directory accessible by your user.

   mkdir -p $HOME/Bin

2. Clone the repo.

   git clone https://github.com/icamys/locindicator.git $HOME/Bin/locindicator

3. Install the dependencies.

   This script requires root privileges to install (jq and the GTK/AppIndicator bindings).

   sudo $HOME/Bin/locindicator/install.sh

4. Bootstrap the indicator.

   Attention! Execute this command on behalf of the user, that is running the graphical interface. Otherwise, the indicator won't appear. Usually, it means that you should run it without sudo.

   The script registers the indicator to run on system start and starts it.

   $HOME/Bin/locindicator/bootstrap.sh

Uninstallation

The following script will stop and remove the currently running indicator, and remove its configuration file. The restart is still possible with after executing install.sh and bootstrap.sh scripts

$HOME/Bin/locindicator/uninstall.sh

Known issues

IP / country code text missing from the tray (flag icon only)

On some systems only the flag icon shows in the tray, with the IP:<address> / country code text label never appearing next to it, even though the indicator is otherwise working correctly.

This is not a bug in locindicator — it's a rendering bug in the Ubuntu AppIndicators GNOME Shell extension (ubuntu/gnome-shell-extension-appindicator, see Launchpad bug #2059818). Investigation via D-Bus (busctl get-property ... XAyatanaLabel) confirmed the indicator sets the label correctly on the StatusNotifierItem. The extension, however, only refreshes its cached panel label when it receives a custom NewLabel/XAyatanaNewLabel D-Bus signal — it does not read org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties.PropertiesChanged and does not poll the property. When the version of libayatana-appindicator backing set_label() doesn't emit that signal (or emits it under a name this extension version doesn't expect), the shell never learns the label changed. The icon, which has its own NewIcon-style signal path, still updates fine — so only the flag renders, never the text next to it.

There is no known fix or workaround within this repo; the label content is already correct on the D-Bus side. If you hit this, either:

• Live with icon-only display (the flag still reflects your current country), or
• Check for an updated gnome-shell-extension-appindicator package (apt changelog gnome-shell-extension-appindicator) that addresses the signal mismatch.

Compatibility

Tested on:

• Ubuntu 24.04
• Ubuntu 22.04