On Wednesday 17 September 2008 10:40:48 Chris G wrote:
Having decided that there's no application out there that can manage both my calendar/time management *and* my reminder/alarm requirements I've decided to look for a dedicated alarm program. My requirements are:-
Must run in the background or be driven by cron so thatalarms will appear regardless of what I'm doing (I will be running an X desktop but that's the only guaranteed thing, actually not quite, Firefox is always running too).
When an event is due I want to be able to pop up dailyreminders from a specified number of days before the event and to be able to stop them when I have 'done' what is required. I'd like the pop-up (flag, whatever) to be permanent until I acknowledge it, something like an icon in the Gnome Panel would be OK.
Events need to be specified by date, time of day is unlikelyto be significant. For most things a yearly repeat would be fine (e.g. a 'birthday' type reminder), I also have several which are quaterly but I'm prepared to deal with them by setting up four annual reminders if necessary.
Kalarm seems to fulfil most of my criteria - any other ideas? Is there something more 'Gnome friendly' or generic maybe?
A PIM or groupware application which can do this might be of interest but I will *not* be running it all the time so note the first criterion above.
Might be worth having a look at Remind http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/Remind. It has a custom scripting language and can pull calendar information from various sources. It can send reminders to various sources too. So you could probably hook it up to libnotify (using notify-send, see your $ man notify-send for details) to make it fit well into X.
But, to be honest, Chris, no one here *really* knows what you want except you. Try a few tools out, decide which one you like best and then go with it. That's part of the fun of this "choice" thing which free software types are often so passionate about. You could even post back your experiences to the list for general interest.
And as a hint, I always find that a good place for searching for software tools for particular jobs is my distribution's package manager (in my case, APT on Debian).
Cheers, Richard