When creating or modifying an alarm, you can:

• choose whether the alarm should display a text message, display a text or image file, execute a command, or send an email.
• configure the alarm to recur on an hours/minutes, daily, weekly, monthly or annual basis, or set it to trigger every time you log in. You can also specify a repetition within a repetition.
• specify that a reminder should be displayed in advance of the main alarm time(s).
• choose a colour and font for displaying the alarm message.
• specify an audible beep or a sound file to play when the message is displayed, or specify that the message is to be spoken.
• choose whether or not the alarm should be cancelled if it can't be triggered at its scheduled time. An alarm can only be triggered while you are logged in and running a graphical environment. If you choose not to cancel the alarm if it can't be triggered at the correct time, it will be triggered when you eventually log in.
• and more ...

You can see screen shots here.

The development version of KAlarm provides a number of new features not available in the stable version. These include:

• A facility to use multiple alarm calendar resources, which for example enables you to share alarms between a laptop and desktop computer.
• The ability to select a time zone for an alarm, and proper handling of summer/winter time changes.
• An option to trigger a recurring alarm only during working hours.
• Alarm edit dialogue simplification and improvements, including replacement of the confusing "simple repetition" facility by a recurrence sub-repetition option.
• An option for the alarm text to be generated by a command.

The development version is reasonably stable by now, and if you need any of its new features you are recommended to use it. But please help improve it by reporting any faults you find.

KAlarm will run in a number of languages, thanks to the efforts of the KDE translation teams. Its user interface has been completely (or nearly completely) translated into: Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK), English (US), Estonian, Finnish, French, Frisian, Gallegan, Georgian, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Khmer, Nepali, Norwegian (bokmaal), Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Low Saxon, Serbian, Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian. It has been translated reasonably into: Hindi, Korean, Malay, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Tamil. Languages supported to a lesser extent are: Afrikaans, Arabic, Belarusian, Bosnian, Breton, Croatian, Faroese, Gaelic (Ireland), Hebrew, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Occitan, Punjabi, Romanian, Rwandan, Northern Sami, Northern Sotho, Tajik, Uzbek, Uzbek (cyrillic), Venda, Welsh, Xhosa, Zulu.

Full up-to-date documentation is included in the download packages in both American and British English. Translations into other languages are also included, in varying states of revision/completeness. Click your chosen language to view the documentation:

KAlarm requires KDE 2.0 or higher to be installed. In order to build it from source, you need to have the Qt and kdelibs development packages installed.

KAlarm is free; it is licensed under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL). But if you find KAlarm useful, please consider supporting it by making a donation.

KAlarm is included in KDE, as part of the kdepim package. If you want the latest version, if you don't want to install kdepim, or if you are running KDE 2, you can download KAlarm as a standalone package here.

Bug reports and suggestions for improvement are welcome. Please send them to David Jarvie.

18 May 2008: Version 2.0.0 beta2 fixes some bugs and adds one new feature. There is a new option to cancel display of an alarm if the pre-alarm action fails. The loss of special pre- and post-alarm actions has been fixed. The bug which prevented a new Find search text working after a failed search is fixed. This version also fixes other bugs, and has improved translations, notably a Portuguese translation of the KAlarm handbook, and an Uzbek Cyrillic user interface translation.

26 April 2008: Version 2.0.0 beta1 builds on the 1.9 development series and is the first beta for KAlarm version 2. The alarm daemon (kalarmd) is now removed. There is a new option to position alarm messages in the centre of screen, with a delay before its buttons are activated to avoid unintentional acknowledgements. The New From Template menu list is now sorted by template name. Alarm templates losing the recurrence count has been fixed, along with a number of other bug fixes. Please test and report any problems.

21 February 2008: Version 1.9.11 beta2 fixes alarms being wrongly shown as never occurring in the alarm list.

17 February 2008: Version 1.9.11 beta is a bug fix release. Several bugs which prevented some recurrence sub-repetitions from being able to be set up have been fixed. Errors in calculating the next trigger time for working-hours-only alarms are fixed, and the calculations speeded up. Archived alarms are no longer displayed after an alarm refresh even when they are supposed to be hidden. A failure to send emails using sendmail has been fixed. The alarm edit dialogue has been improved and its size reduced. The Debian package is now able to automatically replace the official Debian 'kalarm' package. There are a number of other bug fixes, and translations have been improved.

16 February 2008: Version 1.5.2 fixes a couple of bugs which prevented certain recurrence sub-repetitions from being able to be set up. One of the fixes unfortunately missed being included in KDE 3.5.9 by only a couple of hours!

28 January 2008: Version 1.5.0 backports a few features from the 1.9 beta series: simple repetitions are replaced by a sub-repetition button on the recurrence tab to reduce confusion, reminder times can now be specified as a number of minutes, and the alarm edit dialogue layout has been improved. The minimum build requirement is now KDE 3.3.

28 January 2008: Version 1.4.22 fixes some bugs, including a failure to send emails using sendmail, an OpenSolaris build error, and Debian package dependencies.

1 January 2008: Version 1.9.10 beta fixes some important bugs, including crashes when saving preferences and when creating a new alarm with a sub-repetition, and an error preventing alarms being saved to a newly added resource. It now prevents multiple identical error messages being displayed for the same alarm. And the Menu key now works in alarm and resource lists.

28 December 2007: Version 1.4.21 fixes a crash when saving preferences. The last show/hide options in the main window are now remembered when you restart KAlarm. Multiple identical error messages relating to alarm messages are now suppressed, preventing a buildup of messages to be acknowledged.

19 November 2007: Versions 1.9.9 beta2 and 1.4.20 fix a bug where deferring a non-recurring alarm didn't work. Plus some minor bug fixes.

11 November 2007: Version 1.9.9 beta has improvements to the alarm editing user interface: the alarm type is now chosen from the menu, and some layout improvements. You can now generate the display text from the output of a command. A number of important bugs have been fixed: a hangup and temporary system freeze at startup; a failure to trigger some recurring date-only alarms; date-only alarms triggering every minute from midnight until the start-of-day time; an hour's error in the trigger time for some alarms due to errors in summer/winter time determination; the prevention of entering today's times in the alarm edit dialogue (for users in the Americas). There are some other minor improvements and bug fixes, and Korean and Occitan translations have been added.

11 November 2007: Version 1.4.19 fixes a hangup and temporary system freeze which sometimes occurs at startup. A couple of other minor bugs are also fixed.

2 November 2007: Version 1.4.18 fixes a serious bug which prevented some recurring date-only alarms from triggering. It also fixes a bug where date-only alarms triggered every minute until the start-of-day time. The maximum limit for entering time-from-now values has been raised to 999 hours. There are also other improvements and bug fixes. Translations have been improved, including Korean and Occitan for the first time.