Bug 439656

Hello.

I've started using KOrganizer for the first time and experienced a bug where reminders won't show up.

I'd like to describe the troubleshooting process that eventually got them working, for future reference/bug fixing. I'm noting everything that was tried, including what didn't work, so that those steps may be rejected as potential causes. I'm sorry if this report is too verbose, but I'm not a developer, and am trying to include as much useful information as possible. If it serves, it took me much longer to check and document each step than it takes to skim through it. Still, anyone more experienced feel free to edit this report as necessary.

After trying every sensible setting in Settings > Configure KOrganizer, reminders still didn't pop up. I thought there might be some issue with my system's settings, so I tried virtualizing (gnome boxes / virtualbox) fresh stock images of some distros with KDE:

neon-user-20210624-0945.iso
kubuntu-21.04-desktop-amd64.iso
kubuntu-16.04.6-desktop-amd64.iso
openSUSE-Tumbleweed-DVD-x86_64-Snapshot20210706-Media.iso

In all of them, installed all available updates/upgrades before proceeding with the troubleshooting.

I experienced the same issue in all of them, while the /usr/bin/korgac process existed (ps aux). The only distro which I managed to get notifications initially working (out of the box) was (I would say funnily enough, but after two straight days of painstaking debugging it's not so funny) ubuntu-20.04.2.0-desktop-amd64.iso , a gnome-based distro (after installing KOorganizer and its dependencies).

For each attempted change in KOrganizer settings, I tried it with and without rebooting; then, each time, reverting to a fresh install snapshot.

I have tried some suggested solutions found online, like cycling (clicking apply and closing KOrganizer each time) the General>System Tray>"Show Reminder daemon in the System Tray" option (and restarting the system).

Also noticed and tried Time and Date>Default Values>"Enable reminders for new Events" and "Enable reminders for new To-dos" and creating new Events accordingly. I now realize these settings have nothing to do with enabling reminders, but to include them automatically when creating an event.

Installing (on Kubuntu) other packages like akonadiconsole, kalarm, kdepim, kdepim-addons (included in kdepim)).

Changing the other "Time and Date" settings such that I'm "always available" (day begins at 0:00, no holidays, every day of the week, etc.), in case the reminders were being silenced.

In the end, nothing in the KOrganizer settings seemed to work.

What finally did the trick was, and I haven't seen this on any suggestion/fix, to edit the "~/.config/korgacrc" file and setting "Autostart=true" and "Enabled=true" (for reference, the "~/.config/korganizerrc" file and introducing the "ShowReminderDaemon=true" seem to be irrelevant, weren't needed to fix notifications in my case). But still, that and a reboot seemed not to be enough. Additionally, it took doing some random change in KOrganizer settings, like changing the Daily starting hour to some other value, to get it to "register". Then, notifications started working on every of those aforementioned distros. I must stress that a reboot was needed after the changes or else it didn't work (perhaps resetting some service was enough, but I rebooted to make sure).

I have replicated this several times on each of them, and that simple step of editing "korgacrc", some other random change in KOrganizer settings, and then rebooting, seem to be the solution for me.

Hope this is helpful. I really like this application, and it was a shame that it didn't work as expected. Some features in it are really hard to find a replacement for, like the time granularity, down to the minute, for events and reminders, and its ability to set as many reminders as needed for a same event. Besides, it's very well integrated with the rest of KDE's PIM. Kudos to the developers/maintainers.

Should you need some more information, I'll be glad to help. Thanks.