KAlarm

KAlarm is a personal alarm message, command and email scheduler for Linux and Unix.

You can schedule alarm messages to pop up on the screen (with sound if desired), or you can schedule audio to play, commands to execute or emails to send.

When configuring an alarm, you can:

• For alarm messages, choose whether to type in your own text message, display the text generated by a command, or display a text or image file.
• 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. Alarms can be constrained to occur only within working hours.
• Set a reminder to 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 ...

It is possible to use multiple alarm calendars, which for example enables you to share alarms between a laptop and desktop computer.

As an alternative to using KAlarm's graphical interface, alarms may be scheduled from the command line, or via D-Bus/DCOP calls from other programs.

KAlarm is a KDE application. It also runs on Gnome and other desktops.

You can see screen shots here.

Documentation

Requirements & Availability

KAlarm requires KDE to be installed (KDE version 2.0 or later).

KAlarm is included in KDE, as part of the kdepim package. Kdepim for KDE 3.5.10 contains KAlarm version 1.5.4. KAlarm version 2.x is included in the kdepim package in KDE 4.1 and later.

If you want the latest version of KAlarm for KDE 3 or 4, if you don't want to install kdepim, or if you are still running KDE 2, you can download KAlarm as a standalone package here.

In order to build KAlarm from source, you need to have installed development packages for Qt, kdelibs and (for KDE 4 only) kdepimlibs.

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.

Contact & Bug Reporting

You can see the current list of known bugs, and feature requests, here.

Supported Languages

KAlarm will run in a number of languages, thanks to the efforts of the KDE translation teams.

For KDE 4, it has been completely (or nearly completely) translated into: Catalan, Catalan (Valencia), Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK), English (US), Estonian, French, Gallegan, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Latvian, Norwegian (bokmaal), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Low Saxon, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian. It has been translated reasonably into: Bulgarian, Chhattisgarhi, Finnish, Georgian, Hindi, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish. Languages supported to a lesser extent are: Basque, Gaelic (Ireland), Kazakh, Korean, Lithuanian, Maithili, Nepali, Occitan, Persian, Punjabi, Romanian.

For KDE 3, it has been completely (or nearly completely) translated into: Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Catalan (Valencia), 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), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Low Saxon, Serbian, Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian. It has been translated reasonably into: Bosnian, Hindi, Korean, Malay, Tamil. Languages supported to a lesser extent are: Afrikaans, Arabic, Belarusian, 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.

News

7 April 2010: Version 2.5.1 is now available for KDE 4. It fixes a KDE 4 bug whereby audio files are played silently if no volume level has been specified.

4 April 2010: Version 2.5.0, which was recently released for KDE 3, is now available for KDE 4 also.

25 March 2010: Version 2.5.0 (only for KDE 3 now - KDE 4 version will follow soon) features a number of improved checks and bug fixes, and improved Catalan (Valencia) and Czech translations. Start-at-login is no longer automatically reactivated when KAlarm is re-run once after the user switches it off. There is better checking that alarm calendars contain the correct alarm types. Display alarms with command-generated text and audio being erroneously changed to audio-only alarms has been fixed. Corruption of non-ASCII text in email alarms is also fixed. There are other more minor improvements and bug fixes.

8 December 2009: Version 2.4.1 fixes a serious bug in KDE 4 only, where date-only alarms repeatedly triggered at high frequency.

25 November 2009: Version 2.4.0 provides a new audio alarm type, without displaying an alarm window. There is now a configuration setting for duration of alarms copied to KOrganizer. The main menu organisation is improved. Alarm windows are not overlaid on full screen windows on dual head systems. There are numerous minor improvements and bug fixes, including: KAlarm now recognises the system time zone if the name not in the form 'continent/city'; the Polish and Latvian translations are improved.

26 August 2009: Version 2.3.1 includes some improvements, and some important bug fixes, particularly for the KDE 4 version. The edit alarm dialogue OK button is now disabled when no changes have been made, to make it clearer whether clicking OK will actually do anything other than close the dialogue. The system tray icon now shows an indication if any individual alarms are disabled. Bad email addresses when sending email alarms have been fixed. Bugs in the KDE 4 version which have been fixed are a crash when restoring alarms at login, alarm volume settings being ignored, and KMail dependent functions missing.

1 August 2009: Version 2.3.0 includes some usability improvements, and several bug fixes. You can now force the deletion of alarms using Shift-Delete, bypassing the delete confirmation prompt. If you edit a recurring alarm but the entered start time does not correspond to the recurrence specification, you are now warned that the start time needs adjustment. Time zone names are now displayed translated. In KDE4, the bug is fixed whereby the alarm list was not sorted again after alarms triggered. Source package build errors in both KDE3 and KDE4 packages are fixed. There are other more minor bug fixes.

10 July 2009: Version 2.2.5 fixes alarms not triggering if the reminder is erroneously AFTER the alarm; this has been known to happen after upgrading alarms from KAlarm version 1.4. The user is now warned in the edit alarm dialogue if the entered start time needs adjustment to fit the recurrence. Some command line errors are fixed, including --subject and --reminder-once, and a crash.

14 June 2009: Version 2.2.3 fixes three serious bugs affecting KDE4 only. The bugs fixed include those which should have been fixed by version 2.2.2 but due to a packaging fault, they weren't. It fixes email alarms sending multiple copies of the email when they are sent via KMail, a crash closing remote calendars, and a crash when two alarms with audio files are triggered simultaneously, e.g. when redisplaying at startup..

6 June 2009: Version 2.2.1 is now available for both KDE3 and KDE4. The KDE4 package requires KDE 4.2 or later. It fixes a couple of bugs, and a new Ukrainian translation for the handbook is included.

3 May 2009: Version 2.2.0 provides some new facilities together with important bug fixes. There is a new option to export alarms to external calendar files. The View menu now allows alarm and error messages to be spread over the screen for easier viewing, or piled up again. Command execution errors are now indicated by a symbol and tooltip in the alarm list. The default deferral period is now configurable. To-dos may now be dragged and dropped from KOrganizer to KAlarm to create a new alarm. Deferred recurring alarms sometimes being missed has been fixed. There are other bug fixes, including fixing some crashes.