KAlarm is a personal alarm message, command and email scheduler. You can set up alarm messages which pop up on the screen at chosen times (with sound if desired), or you can schedule commands to be executed or emails to be sent.

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 ...

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

You can see screen shots here.

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: Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Danish, Dutch, English (UK), English (US), Estonian, Finnish, French, Gallegan, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Norwegian (bokmaal), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Low Saxon, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian. It has been translated reasonably into: Basque, Chhattisgarhi, Czech, Frisian, Georgian, Hindi, Hungarian, Kazakh, Persian, Serbian, Serbian (Latin), Slovenian, Turkish. Languages supported to a lesser extent are: Afrikaans, Arabic, Belarusian, Bosnian, Breton, Croatian, Gaelic (Ireland), Hebrew, Icelandic, Korean, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Nepali, Occitan, Punjabi, Romanian, Rwandan, Northern Sami, Northern Sotho, Tajik, Tamil, 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. 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, 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.

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

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

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.

26 February 2009: Version 2.1.5 is a bug fix release. When an alarm message is displayed, any active screensaver is now cancelled to enable the alarm to be seen. Multiple identical command error messages are now suppressed. Invalid alarms are eliminated when KAlarm reads the calendar; these alarms used to get stuck and cause high CPU usage. A number of other bugs are also fixed.

28 January 2009: Version 1.5.5 fixes numerous bugs in the old stable version. You are recommended to use the current stable version 2.1.2 in preference - only use 1.5.5 if you have a particular reason to stay with the old version.

27 December 2008: Version 2.1.2 offers the option to define global shortcuts for New Alarm actions. Alarm windows are now shown on top of full-screen windows (e.g. VMware) - although due to X11 restrictions they have no title bar. Adding alarms to KOrganizer now works when Kontact is running but the calendar component has not been activated. A couple of crashes on startup have been fixed. There are other bug fixes, and also some translation updates.

27 November 2008: Version 2.1.0 provides some new features, revamped dialogue layouts, and bug fixes. You can now exclude holidays from recurring alarms. The alarm edit dialogue by default shows a simplified set of options: the full set of options is displayed using a More Options button. The Preferences dialogue is reorganised more logically. Both these dialogues now scroll if they are too high to fit the screen. There are now separate toolbar icons for creating new alarms of each type - if upgrading, you may need to edit your toolbar to see these icons. This version fixes alarms not triggering correctly after the system wakes from hibernation. There are other minor features and bug fixes.