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 the KDE libraries to be installed. The latest version of KAlarm requires KDE libraries version 4.2 or later, but older versions of KAlarm are available for KDE 3 and KDE 2.

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

For general discussion and user questions, go to the KAlarm forum.

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

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, Hungarian, Interlingua, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Khmer, Norwegian (bokmaal), Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Low Saxon, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian. It has been translated reasonably into: Bosnian, Bulgarian, Chhattisgarhi, Finnish, Greek, Latvian, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Turkish. Languages supported to a lesser extent are: Basque, Gaelic (Ireland), Hindi, Korean, Lithuanian, Maithili, Occitan, Persian, Punjabi, Slovenian, Uyghur.

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

To be notified automatically whenever a new version of KAlarm is released, go to the KAlarm project at either Freshmeat or KDE-Apps and subscribe for notifications.

24 April 2012: KAlarm now has a dedicated forum where you can ask questions and discuss issues. The forum is at http://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=229.

1 April 2012: Version 2.9.0 adds a new option to execute a pre-alarm action before deferred alarms trigger, and new options to auto-hide the system tray icon when no alarms are due. The Try button in the audio alarm edit dialogue now toggles playback start and stop. It also provides other minor improvements and bug fixes. It includes a new Catalan translation of the handbook.

24 September 2011: Version 2.7.4 fixes a crash when the last recurrence of a late-cancel alarm triggers too late. Editing an alarm from the alarm message window now works. Prompt or warning messages no longer prevent interaction with alarm windows, provided KDE 4.7.1 or later is installed. It also includes other minor improvements and bug fixes.

26 July 2011: Version 2.7.3 for KDE 4 fixes the Wake From Suspend dialogue not appearing or crashing. It also fixes handbook translations not being installed properly. It includes a new Dutch translation of the handbook.

19 July 2011: Version 2.7.2 for KDE 4 contains a number of improvements to the wake-from-suspend feature. It fixes non-latin scripts not appearing correctly in emails, and fixes KAlarm still running sometimes when no visible windows or system tray icon remain. It includes a new Interlingua translation.

10 June 2011: Version 2.7.0 is now available for KDE 4, containing new features and bug fixes. There are new options for setting a reminder to appear AFTER the main alarm; for waking your computer from suspension or hibernation when the alarm triggers (provided your system supports this feature); and for allowing alarm monitoring to be disabled at startup. Bug fixes include tidying up the display of the left hand spin buttons in time entry fields. There is now a Bosnian translation.

13 April 2011: Now that most distros have switched to KDE 4, the KDE 3 version of KAlarm is no longer supported, and no more updates will be issued after version 2.6.2.

15 December 2010: Version 2.6.2 is now available for KDE 3 and KDE 4. It fixes working-time-only alarms sometimes not triggering if KAlarm is started up outside working hours. It fixes the system tray icon showing at login when configured not to. The disabled system tray icon is now more distinguishable for colour blind users. Plus other more minor bug fixes.

4 October 2010: Version 2.6.1 (for KDE 4 only) adds the facility to allow alarms whose text is generated by a command to have pre- and post-alarm actions (which was accidentally omitted from the KDE 4 variant of version 2.6.0). It also fixes a couple of crashes.

3 October 2010: Version 2.6.0 is now available for KDE 3 and KDE 4. It provides the new option to suppress notification of pre-alarm action errors, which facilitates use of the pre-alarm action to determine whether the alarm should appear. Pre- and post-alarm actions are now possible with alarms whose texts are generated by commands. The KDE 4 version now warns at startup if the system's time zones cannot be accessed and only UTC can be used. It fixes some crashes, and a number of other bugs. A full Kazakh translation is now included.

13 June 2010: Version 2.5.2 is now available for KDE 3 and KDE 4. It fixes a KDE 4 bug where the alarm edit dialogue invoked by the alarm window Edit button did not save changes. Another KDE 4 bug which prevented the deferral of non-recurring alarms is also fixed. There are a number of other bug fixes for both KDE 3 and KDE 4.