Chapter 5. Alarm daemon

The alarm daemon, KAlarmd, monitors KAlarm's calendar file for alarms becoming due. When it determines that an alarm is due, it tells KAlarm to display or execute it, or to cancel it if it is late and late trigger was not selected for that alarm.

Under KDE3, the alarm daemon may also be used by other applications, including KOrganizer.

The alarm daemon runs in the background, with no user interface. It may be controlled as described below.

Starting, resetting and stopping the alarm daemon

The alarm daemon is normally started at KDE session login (unless you use the Service Manager dialog to disable auto start), and runs continuously until logout. If for any reason it is not running, alarm monitoring will not occur and KAlarm will not display or execute any alarms.

Starting the alarm daemon

To start the alarm daemon, you can either run KAlarm in its default graphical mode (i.e. without any command line parameters), enable alarms using KAlarm's system tray icon menu, reset the daemon as described below, start it using the Service Manager dialog (see Controlling the alarm daemon with the Service Manager) or you can run the alarm daemon directly from the command line:

% kalarmd

Resetting the alarm daemon

It is also possible to reset the alarm daemon without stopping it. Resetting causes the alarm daemon to re-read the list of scheduled messages from the calendar file and re-initialize its KAlarm-related data.

Why might you want to reset the alarm daemon? It isn't a very likely occurrence, but if for any reason KAlarm was not able to run when the alarm daemon told it to trigger an alarm, that alarm will never be displayed or executed until the alarm daemon is either reset or restarted. Resetting is preferable to stopping the alarm daemon and restarting it, since resetting the daemon will not affect any other applications which use the alarm daemon.

Tip

Resetting starts the alarm daemon if it is not currently running.

To reset the alarm daemon, either use the menu command Actions->Refresh Alarms or type the following command:

% kalarm --reset

Stopping the alarm daemon

Stopping the alarm daemon will prevent any further monitoring of scheduled alarm messages until the daemon is restarted.

Warning

Stopping it will affect the functioning of any other applications which also use the alarm daemon. Consider resetting the daemon instead.

To stop the alarm daemon, either use the Service Manager dialog (see Controlling the alarm daemon with the Service Manager), or type the following command:

% kalarm --stop