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), Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Low Saxon, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian. It has been translated reasonably into: Basque, Czech, Frisian, Georgian, Hindi, Hungarian, Kazakh, Russian, Serbian, Serbian (Latin), Slovenian, Turkish. Languages supported to a lesser extent are: Afrikaans, Arabic, Belarusian, Bosnian, Breton, Croatian, Faroese, 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 3.5.9 contains KAlarm version 1.5.1. KAlarm version 2.0.2 is included in the kdepim package in KDE 4.1.1.

If you want the latest version of KAlarm for KDE 3, 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.

27 September 2008: Version 2.0.5 fixes a very high CPU usage by KAlarm when there are alarms with sub-repetitions or deferrals with periods greater than 1 week.

8 September 2008: Version 2.0.3 brings some improvements to colour selection. The standard KDE colour picker is now used for selecting colours, and a background colour selector is shown for file display alarms. It fixes a bug whereby KAlarm quit when the main window was closed even though the system tray icon was visible. There are other more minor bug fixes.

26 July 2008: Version 2.0.1 fixes crashes when quitting KAlarm. Some missing translations for creating or editing resources have been added. This brings the KDE 3 version to the same state as the forthcoming KDE 4.1 version of KAlarm.

9 July 2008: The much improved stable version 2.0.0 is now available. This has been in development for over two years in the 1.9 and 2.0 beta series, and is functionally the same as the forthcoming KDE 4.1 version of KAlarm. See the change log for details of its new features compared to the previous stable version 1.5.

25 June 2008: Version 2.0.0 beta3a fixes documentation being installed into the wrong directory on some systems. This bug only applies when building KAlarm from source.

18 June 2008: Version 2.0.0 beta3 fixes some bugs, including alarms showing "Never" in the alarm list after being created by the command line or DCOP, and some crashes when quitting KAlarm. The font and colour selector may now be viewed in the alarm edit dialogue when in read-only mode. Plus other bug fixes, and improved translations.

16 June 2008: Version 1.5.3 in the stable series provides a number of bug fixes, including the loss of recurrence count when creating alarms from alarm templates, and Find not working with a new search text after a failed search. A number of other lesser bugs are also fixed.

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.