KAlarm Installation

Requirements

KAlarm for KDE 4 requires kdelibs 4.2 or higher to be installed. In order to build it from source, the following development packages also need to be installed:

cmake
Qt development package
kdelibs and kdepimlibs development packages

The following optional packages enhance KAlarm if they are installed:

kttsd (from kdeaccessibility package): if installed and configured (together with a compatible speech synthesiser package), it allows KAlarm to speak alarm messages when alarms are displayed.

Quick Guide

KAlarm is built and installed as follows. The use of the obj/ directory for building is only a suggestion; you can use any other directory you choose.

cd kalarm-2.7.4
mkdir obj
cd obj
cmake ..
make
[ Log in as root ]
cd kalarm-2.7.4/obj
make install

Options for cmake which may be of particular use are:

-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=kdedir

/usr

Example: to install into /opt/kde4:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/kde4

WARNING: If you install into a different directory than the KDE installation, you must prefix your installation directory path to the run-time environment variable KDEDIRS, and restart KDE. Otherwise KAlarm will not run correctly. If you don't understand what this means, you should install into the standard KDE directory.

-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debugfull

KAlarm

Setting up on non-KDE desktops

Although KAlarm is a KDE application and requires the KDE libraries to be installed on your system, you can still use it while running other desktops or window managers.

In order to have alarms monitored and displayed automatically from one login session to the next, KAlarm must be run automatically when you graphically log in or otherwise start X. If you are running the KDE desktop, the KAlarm installation process sets this up for you.

GNOME 2

Run Desktop Preferences -> Advanced -> Sessions. In the Sessions dialog, select the Startup Programs tab and click Add. Enter kalarmautostart kalarm --tray as the Startup Command. This will run KAlarm in the system tray every time you start up.

Other Window Managers

If you want to use KAlarm with a non-KDE window manager:

If your desktop environment/window manager performs session restoration, ensure that the kalarm is included in the session restoration, and that after login or restarting X kalarm is running with a '-session' command line option, e.g.
You can use the 'ps' command to check this.
Using session restoration will ensure that alarm message windows which were displayed at the time of logout will be redisplayed when you log in again.
To ensure that KAlarm is always started when you log in, even if it was not running at logout (so that it wouldn't be included in session restoration), you should configure one of the following commands to be run whenever you graphically log in or start X:
1. If you cannot use session restoration to start KAlarm, run:
2. If you use session restoration, you MUST NOT use the above command, but instead run:
  The reason for using this command instead is that if kalarm --tray is executed while session restoration is already underway, KAlarm will fail to start. This is an unavoidable consequence of how a KDE application interacts with session restoration.
If your desktop environment or window manager has a facility to configure programs to be run at login, you can use that facility. Otherwise, you need to add the command to an appropriate script which is run after X is started.

If you can send me details on how to set up KAlarm for any particular window manager, I will include these in the next version of KAlarm.

Accessing language translations

KAlarm will automatically use whatever language you have configured your KDE desktop to use (provided of course that the KAlarm package includes that language translation!). To set up KDE to use a particular language, first install the relevant 'i18n' language package which is part of the KDE release, and then use KDE System Settings to select your country and language.