KAlarm Installation

Requirements

KAlarm requires kdelibs 3.3 or higher to be installed. In order to build it from source, the following development packages also need to be installed: The following optional packages enhance KAlarm if they are installed:

Quick Guide

KAlarm is built and installed in the standard way.

Options for ./configure which may be of particular use are:

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:
  1. 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.

  2. 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:
        kalarm --tray

    2. If you use session restoration, you MUST NOT use the above command, but instead run:
        kalarmautostart kalarm --tray

      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 the KDE Control Centre to select your country and language.

Basic Installation

These are generic installation instructions.

The configure shell script attempts to guess correct values for various system-dependent variables used during compilation. It uses those values to create a Makefile in each directory of the package. It may also create one or more .h files containing system-dependent definitions. Finally, it creates a shell script config.status that you can run in the future to recreate the current configuration, a file config.cache that saves the results of its tests to speed up reconfiguring, and a file config.log containing compiler output (useful mainly for debugging configure).

If you need to do unusual things to compile the package, please try to figure out how configure could check whether to do them, and mail diffs or instructions to the address given in the README so they can be considered for the next release. If at some point config.cache contains results you don't want to keep, you may remove or edit it.

The file configure.in is used to create configure by a program called autoconf. You only need configure.in if you want to change it or regenerate configure using a newer version of autoconf.

The simplest way to compile this package is:

  1. cd to the directory containing the package's source code and type ./configure to configure the package for your system. If you're using csh on an old version of System V, you might need to type sh ./configure instead to prevent csh from trying to execute configure itself. Running configure takes a while. While running, it prints some messages telling which features it is checking for.
  2. Type make to compile the package.
  3. Type make install to install the programs and any data files and documentation.
  4. You can remove the program binaries and object files from the source code directory by typing make clean.

Detailed Options

Compilers and Options

Some systems require unusual options for compilation or linking that the configure script does not know about. You can give configure initial values for variables by setting them in the environment. Using a Bourne-compatible shell, you can do that on the command line like this:

Or on systems that have the `env' program, you can do it like this:

Compiling For Multiple Architectures

You can compile the package for more than one kind of computer at the same time, by placing the object files for each architecture in their own directory. To do this, you must use a version of make that supports the VPATH variable, such as GNU make. cd to the directory where you want the object files and executables to go and run the configure script. configure automatically checks for the source code in the directory that configure is in and in `..'.

If you have to use a make that does not supports the VPATH variable, you have to compile the package for one architecture at a time in the source code directory. After you have installed the package for one architecture, use make distclean before reconfiguring for another architecture.

Installation Names

By default, make install will install the package's files in `/usr/local/bin', `/usr/local/man', etc. You can specify an installation prefix other than `/usr/local' by giving configure the option --prefix=path.

You can specify separate installation prefixes for architecture-specific files and architecture-independent files. If you give configure the option --exec-prefix=path, the package will use path as the prefix for installing programs and libraries. Documentation and other data files will still use the regular prefix.

If the package supports it, you can cause programs to be installed with an extra prefix or suffix on their names by giving configure the option --program-prefix=prefix or --program-suffix=suffix.

Optional Features

Some packages pay attention to --enable-feature options to configure, where feature indicates an optional part of the package. They may also pay attention to --with-package options, where package is something like `gnu-as' or `x' (for the X Window System). Specific --enable- and --with- options that the package recognises are described above in Quick Guide.

For packages that use the X Window System, configure can usually find the X include and library files automatically, but if it doesn't, you can use the configure options --x-includes=dir and --x-libraries=dir to specify their locations.

Specifying the System Type

There may be some features configure can not figure out automatically, but needs to determine by the type of host the package will run on. Usually configure can figure that out, but if it prints a message saying it can not guess the host type, give it the --host=type option. type can either be a short name for the system type, such as `sun4', or a canonical name with three fields: CPU-COMPANY-SYSTEM

See the file config.sub for the possible values of each field. If config.sub isn't included in this package, then this package doesn't need to know the host type.

If you are building compiler tools for cross-compiling, you can also use the --target=type option to select the type of system they will produce code for and the --build=type option to select the type of system on which you are compiling the package.

Sharing Defaults

If you want to set default values for configure scripts to share, you can create a site shell script called config.site that gives default values for variables like CC, cache_file, and prefix. configure looks for PREFIX/share/config.site if it exists, then PREFIX/etc/config.site if it exists. Or, you can set the CONFIG_SITE environment variable to the location of the site script. A warning: not all configure scripts look for a site script.

Operation Controls

configure recognises the following options to control how it operates. configure also accepts some other, not widely useful, options.